The deal with Rump was to lay off half the employees in return for tax breaks.
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On the one hand, this little drama is starting to expose what it’s all about, the failure of a man’s vision of himself as being able to turn every line of his own bullshit into something that other people will invest in. On the other hand, no one will care much if speculators lose money on short positions.
I was genuinely surprised by how close to reality some of the stories were in Leverage. At least until the thing happened where justice happened; that shit was totally unrealistic.
We need a new Leverage with a whole new production team who isn’t burnt out on the despair of it all.
Navigating the integrated fantasies of privatized utopia and social-democratic pragmatism.
This is an excellent post exposing the fallacy of the magical honky, the idea that we can only exist if there’s a dude in control ready to swoop in on a helicopter, make some deals, and swoop off leaving us, if not better, then at least suitably terrorized to remain a cohesive unit.
If only we had the right God of Industry 
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Does Loki count? He likes fire, and most industrial processes rely on fire, or noxious chemicals, or both.
I really wonder about him lately. Drugs? Too much exposure to Hollywood? Too much of his own hype? The pre-Amber Elon Musk was pretty sane and did some really interesting things. Nowadays, not so much. And lately he seems to be bent on self-destruction. Not blaming her by any means-- correlation is not causation-- it’s just that relationship seems to me to be the point where he went off the rails.
For a long time, it was Steve Jobs who was essentially Zeus (to, I guess, Bill Gates’s Hades) in that pantheon. In Mr. Jobs’s early days, he was a seeker of wisdom who took LSD — take that Azealia Banks! — to find it. Then he was a tech brat in a bow tie, who was cast out in the wilderness for his brashness. Still later, the fallen immortal was redeemed and returned to Mount Olympus, wielding an iPod as his thunderbolt.
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I have only the barest knowledge of Greek Mythology… but I’m pretty sure that that’s not a good analogy. All of the Olympians, including Hades, acknowledged the leadership of Zeus. And Zeus wasn’t cast out for brashness; he was spared from being eaten by his father Cronus at birth, and later returned to fight him and claim the throne of Olympus. I don’t recall him ever being cast out after that, or having any significant beef with Hades.
I mean, that paragraph seems to imply that all the writer knows about Greek Mythology is that Zeus is the King of the Gods and Hades is the God of the Underworld, with the notion that the God of the Underworld is evil, and at odds with the allfather, probably coming from Christianity (or maybe the Disney movie Hercules).
OT: Sarah Diemer’s The Dark Wife is a good adaptation of 'Ellenic myth. Of course it changes a few things, but its portrayal of Zeus is probably a lot truer to the classical view.
tw for rape and murder.
I might write that God, but it wouldn’t be the spirit of industry if it was like Musk. A proper God of Industry would be, like, on fire in the most wonderful way possible. More Surtur than Loki, for sure.
Like, any of it, really, to believe in it just a little bit? With Musk’s background? The bullshit will just take over.
Elon Musk has literally always been an asshole that said crazy things.
I don’t get the Elon Musk hate.
Yeah, rich white guy with an ego the size of Texas. You might not want to go have a beer with him (though I would) but he has a magic touch when it comes to innovation and engineering. Certainly he’s had some setbacks. After the first few SpaceX failures, I thought that was doomed, and boy was I wrong.
Paypal was a stupid idea. What? A private bank-like entity run for main purpose of facilitating people buying used stuff for a few bucks? How would that work out? I was wrong, that worked out pretty well.
I never thought he’d turn electric cars that run on flashlight batteries into a thing… but he has. I was wrong again.
Solar roof shingles? That’s crazy! Umm, ok, maybe not.
Offhand, I can’t think of any industry that he’s jumped into that he’s failed at. I admire that, and I think he’s probably this generation’s Edison, and I don’t say that lightly.
Of course being Edison is consistent with being an asshole that says crazy things.
Edison stole a lot of ideas and ruined a lot of lives, so I rather hope Musk isn’t like him.
I agree Musk has done a lot of good by promoting and providing solutions for alternative energy sources. Nothing like a good-looking electric sports car to get rid of preconceptions of electric cars being “weak” (and wow, we could spend an entire thread unpacking that stuff).
But he’s been making PR missteps lately. I don’t know how much of it is real – some of it lately has sounded suspiciously like Cold War-style smear campaigns – but it’s starting to hurt his stock.
Edison was a downright asshole.
It was definitely good timing. Internet commerce and communication was exploding in popularity, a huge market. But there were no options for transferring money via the internet (mail a personal check, go buy a money order and mail that, or pay $35 to a place like western union to send $20 to someone who then has to go pick it up). Merchant accounts and payment gateways were an obsolete mess that wasn’t prepared to work with the internet. There were no security standards regarding credit and debit cards, so the data was often stored plaintext in systems that had no security, and sometimes transferred via plaintext email.