In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As I noted the other day, the news late last week and over the weekend was that Elon was going to fire half of Twitter's work force. I was skeptical, if for no other reason than the managers he tasked with drawing up the lists of whom to fire had an incentive to sabotage the process by firing the people who actually made the company run, insofar as it did. But in any case, a project that big planned in the space of a week wasn't going to turn out well. As of yesterday, Twitter has asked dozens of employees that were laid off after Elon Musk took office to return. This is just days after nearly half of the company’s workforce across countries were asked to go, as per multiple media reports. According to sources cited by Bloomberg , a few of those who are being asked to return were “laid off by mistake” while others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features the new boss Elon Musk envisions. Once again, l...

The German theoretical physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder has a blog as well, where she often posts text versions of her YouTube presentations. I follow several physics YouTubers, in part because I have a suspicion that there are theoretical physics classes in Purgatory. However, Dr Hossenfelder also posts opinions on general topics, sometimes quirky ones. In a recent post, she talks about a school of thought she calls "longtermism", which it seems to me is in opposition to the current neo-Malthusian strain among globalists. In doing so, she gives an insight into Elon Musk's thinking, although I can't completely disagree with anyone who asks, "Why would you want to have that?" Have you ever put away a bag of chips because they say it isn’t healthy? That makes sense. Have you ever put away a bag of chips because you want to increase your chances of having more children so we can populate the entire galaxy in a billion years? That makes. . . That ...

There's been quite a bit of comment over Elon Musk laying off what's been estimated as half of Twitter's workforce. A typical version, from a Twitter internal e-mail, goes like this: "By 9 am PST on Friday, November 4, everyone will receive an individual e-mail with the subject line: Your Role at Twitter. (...) If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter e-mail. If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal e-mail." The 7,000 or so employees of the social media platform bought by Elon Musk received this e-mail on Thursday, November 3, just a few hours before the company launched a vast layoff process. The method illustrates the expeditious, even brutal style of the unstoppable entrepreneur and boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who acquired the company a week earlier. Offhand, I've never tried to tally up the number of times I was laid off, or in some cases fired, over my ...

Yesterday I pointed out that even if we rely on consensus mainstream reporting on the Paul Pelosi attack, supplemented by court documents, there continue to be puzzling questions about precisely what happened at the front door of the Pelosi home after police arrived and why security there was so lax that a disorganized psychotic could enter the home without tripping an alarm, as well as how the Capitol Police could have missed the incident on their live camera feed. This comes after nearly everyone discarded theories that David DePape was Paul's gay lover or was in the home for other questionable purposes -- although it must be acknowledged that SFPD Chief Scott's initial statements were so poorly written that they left room for misinterpretation until other sources like court filings became available. The problem is that the media consensus stubbornly continues a lack of transparency over even the current revised version of the story. NBC News pulled a report Frida...

As I noted earlier this week, many of the original questions about David DePape's assault on Paul Pelosi arose from the poorly written account SFPD Chief Scott originally gave of the event, made worse by at least two subsequent "clarifications" that raised more questions than they answered. For now, it seems as though we have a version of the attack that's more or less reliable in its general outlines: David DePape, a disorganized psychotic, was able to bypass the home's security, break in via a rear door, surprise Pelosi while he was sleeping, and engage in an incoherent exchange that gave Pelosi the opportunity to pick up a phone and call 911. The 911 operator, sensing something was wrong as Pelosi sought to communicate in code, caused the police dispatcher to declare an emergency, at which point the police quickly arrived. This set of events took place within the span of a few minutes. There seems to be no reason to doubt that DePape and Pelosi did not know e...

A piece by Emily Oster from Monday in the Atlantic, home of David Brooks and Francis Fukuyama, Let's Declare A Pandemic Amnesty , has attracted a certain amount of comment. Ms Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, points this out in her piece to establish her credentialed membership in the elite, which is the platform from which she makes her proposal: In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. . . . Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic...

Yesterday I asked why the Pelosi San Francisco home didn't have even the sort of doorway alarms that come with ordinary suburban home security systems. I got a partial answer in this morning's news . According to the Washington Post: The U.S. Capitol Police had cameras outside the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but they were not monitored, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Capitol Police saw the flash of police lights on the camera, rewound the video and saw the break-in, according to the sources. It is unclear whether or not the cameras should have been monitored at the time. Just the News has a slightly different version : A live security video feed at the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught the suspect in the recent assault on her husband Paul Pelosi, but no one from the U.S. Capitol Police was watching, sources told Just the News. U.S. Capitol Police did not return numerous requests for comment on Tuesday. A source reveal...