Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

Been using online banking since 2000, no problem, but mobile Mmmm.

 

Makes one wonder who reads a book about the ramblings from a former British PM who lasted about a month before being kicked out due to being so unpopular?

I understand why some people might want to read the memoirs or autobiographies from political leaders, however much we may disagree with them, but I'll never understand who reads ones from relative non-entities like Truss, except political journalists.

 

Well,at least he'll use the money to give us all a laugh when he attempts to shoot the next damp squib into space

 

Maybe he [Musk] could use it to take himself and all his pals to live permanently on the moon, if he doesn't want to use all his excess wealth to help people all over the world who are struggling now, and probably for a long time to come.

 

I'm not going to stick up for Elon Musk. But just to inject some balance, he's minted because he's apparently good at business, which means he employs a lot of people.

His businesses are mostly a bit crazy, daring to try to do stuff that nobody else thinks will work. That makes him a pioneer. That's good for technological and scientific advance because not only do his companies generate lots of data, but others watch closely and presumably learn from his companies successes and fails.

Should Musk get a 56 billion payout? We don't really get to decide that, but if we did, my first question would be what will he do with it? If he intends to reinvest it either to grow existing companies to employ more people, or into new startups, that's an entirely different prospect than spending it all on yachts and beer or whatever stinking rich people blow their pocket money on.

So I suspect, as usual, the media gives us half a story, spun in a way that suits them. People are raging at the moment about the cost of living crisis, so a spin that shows one person getting a handout so huge most of us can't even imagine, that's news. But if the truth happens to be more like, business owner might get huge cash injection to reinvest in business empire, that's not even really news at all, it's just how business works.

 

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree. Isn't he minted because he has exploited the workforce? Is he a successful business man? Yes, he has got away with giving that impression, and various shareholder bubbles have helped him along, so in that sense, he is. But his driverless vehicle development (to take one example) has been problematic. Indeed, people have died, but no charges have been brought. Why? Too big to touch?

Is he part of the American Dream ... or complicit in furthering the American Nightmare? I haven't read a book specifically about him, though he gets mentioned in any on the damaging control a few men (Gates, Zuckerberg, etc) are exerting over the world.

 

Again not defending him, but do you have any examples of businesses that don't exploit the workforce? I think most of us would like to apply to work with such companies.

Yes. Yes he is. He's minted, and several of his companies are household names. One of his company, SpaceX, is no successful that NASA uses them for many of their space lifts.

A lot of those shareholders are ordinary people. I'm a shareholder. There is Tesla stock in my stocks and shares ISA portfolio as part of the S&P 500 bundle. Lots of pension funds will be holding some proportion of stocks of Musk's companies.

Because it's really, really hard. So hard that most people were afraid to touch it. Image recognition, object detection, range estimation, these are the things a lot of people think about when they think about self driving cars, because that's what the early media reports talked about. Each of those things is quite difficult technologically. And certainly very difficult to do reliably. They serve to demonstrate just how fantastic human visual perception is and how hard it is to replicate with technology. In recent years it's improved a huge amount, largely because of pioneers willing to try. But that's only half of it. The other half of the story is deciding what do do with that information. There's an ethical component to that. A classic scenario is this. An out of control truck is heading straight at you. Maintaining course will result in head in collision. There is a young mother pushing a pram on the pavement. Swerve and you will hit her and her baby. What should the software of the self driving vehicle do? Sacrifice the vehicle occupants, or protect them at the cost of the pedestrian? That's an absolutely awful conundrum that can't be decided by technology alone. This is one of several reasons self driving cars are not as far on as people imagined they would be by now.

It is of course always tragic when people die. But there are fatal workplace accidents in all sorts of companies all over the world all the time. Or do you mean the Tesla self driving car fatalities? Where each incident was thoroughly investigated. In the cases I'm aware of, Tesla was not found to be at fault. In one example, the car alerted the driver several times that it was having difficulty reading the deteriorating road conditions, and prompted the driver to take manual control. He ignored several prompts, before the car dropped off a ridge on a mountain road. In another example the Tesla drove straight under a truck. In the investigation it was found that the angle of the sunshine and the lack of skirting on the truck meant the sensors and software simply couldn't see it. Tragic of course, but I wonder how many fatal road accidents happen because the human driver simply didn't see the hazard.

With respect, this bit sounds like pure conspiracy theory. I don't like Zuckerberg. But that's unimportant. He is a business person. He's mostly successful. But not because he has any kind of power over people, other than that he has clearly given people what they want. If people didn't want his offerings, he wouldn't be a big name. Bill Gates, I have mixed views on. But again, as ruthless as Microsoft was for all the years that Bill Gates headed it, it was successfully for one reason only. They produce the best software. For most of my career I was a software developer. I mostly worked on what is termed the Microsoft stack (basically Microsoft's suite of tools and services) but occasionally had to work on the rival Linux based stuff. It was always a chore to work with non-Microsoft stuff. In contrast, every Microsoft tool is both well documented, and integrates seamlessly together, both with other Microsoft stuff, and with more popular non MS stuff. That's why Microsoft, and Bill Gates are so successful. They deliver useful stuff.

Bill Gates retired a few years ago. By then he'd accumulated huge personal wealth. Way more than any person can spend on themselves. So guess what he did with most of it? No, he didn't invent a tracking chip that fits in a vaccine needle. But he did set up a foundation dedicated to finding ways to protect people, wildlife and the planet.

As an aside, Bill Gates used his connections and knowledge in the field of big data analysis to predict, and try to warn world leaders that the biggest immediate threat to humanity was not war but disease. His foundation basically predicted a viral pandemic some years before COVID. There are people online that use this fact to suggest that Bill Gates orchestrated, on the basis that he was the only one that knew it was coming so must have made it happen. In truth his foundation simply had access to all the data modelling and analysis powers of Microsoft, and had used it to try to urge world leaders to prepare. So in effect when Bill Gates made a video explaining his prediction, he was trying to save lives. When he was largely ignored and people died as a result, people used his warning as evidence against him.

 

Sounds a bit like an extract from The Godfather, "its not personal, strictly business"!
I agree Bill Gates is a different beast to Mucks... I admire the man for doing good with some of his vast wealth, which that in itself can pose danger to him. Not too sure of the picture of Gates and MS as the history of MS is poor from my experience as a user, who knows where we would be if CPM had a won over MS-DOS. Still I'd have to admit, that did take business skills (be they for good or bad). I also still use Windows (albeit 10) and Edge as a browser and they compare to anything these days - since Gates left??

 

Actually to be honest about SpaceX (idiotic puerile wordplay on sex) is only still in existence because of the big handouts by NASA. One of the many contradictions in the life and business affairs of this man baby...he hates the "big state" but happy to be kept solvent by it.

What he has done with Twitter shows that he has zero business accumen, after all he only bought it because he made a stupid offer so he can stop all the people that mocked him on the platform. And he went on to do what he tried early on with PayPal...the stupid and meaningless X branding. Back then he was stopped by people who knew what it took to make the business profitable and was ousted.

Now he has this Messiah halo and has been allowed to burn money so he can post his own moronic ideas on Twitter. I have zero time for him and his companies. His fans are indulging him with religious zeal in supporting every move he makes but hope there are enough people that can see right through his nonsense.

 

Hmm. Stinking rich bloke with multiple global companies to his name has no business acumen. Very interesting conclusion.

 

Richest man in the world [ some of the time ], but he is stupid, I don't think so. Sounds like jealousy.

 

So ... after much reading on the subject of the impact of wealth inequality (book list available on request ) ... my take is allowing or enabling a very few people to be in charge of a huge proportion of the world's resources is dangerous. It wouldn't matter if the individuals were altruistic saints (which none of those under discussion are). Philanthropism has a dark side. To accumulate the great wealth in the first place you have exploited people or resources (and usually both). To then have individuals decide what pet projects they spend it on is not democratic. And these billionaires make a huge amount out of their philanthropy, in tax breaks and through having financial interests in the things they "offer". That's why the rich go on getting richer.

The American Dream (where hard work can get you success) may never have been true, but right now it has never been more untrue. And this is in no small part due to the spread of the Amazon business model - poor pay, poor conditions, constant tracking, huge staff turnover to perpetuate insecurity, zero hrs contracts, and so on. These mean workers can't plan ahead to pay for housing, get into debt which they can never clear, fall into despair and take refuge in drugs, etc. So, a few people have become very rich and now wave their fortunes around, but who has paid? Ordinary people ... and tax payers. Interestingly, Google's biggest income stream is now from the US Military, paid for by taxes.

I am not against entrepreneurship, but people and the ability of society to function are more important than a few men achieving enormous wealth. Dupont released toxic forever chemicals into the water systems of the world starting in the 60s. Doing so increased shareholder profits, but at what cost? Some things can never be rowed back from, and the accumulation of extreme wealth by a few needs to be addressed before that reaches a point of no return too.

IMV.

 

But how do you stop them?
Human nature, determines that some will always try to get richer, usually at the expense of others.