Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted
1 hour ago, Da Fino said:

This guy might be the second biggest douche bag in the country. It’s astonishing how much he has killed his personal brand just by being more accessible. 

Second?

Posted
13 minutes ago, Ghost of NMAS said:

#1 rhymes with rump

I figured figured that's what our brother Shamus was getting at, but to me they aren't the same. Elon is the world's biggest douche by a large margin. Trump is a cunt of the highest magnitude and a laundry list of deplorable things and generally the second worst human to Hitler so far, but douchebag has a certain je ne sais quoi that Elon takes the cake on.

  • Hook 'Em 1
Posted
32 minutes ago, BearMace said:

I figured figured that's what our brother Shamus was getting at, but to me they aren't the same. Elon is the world's biggest douche by a large margin. Trump is a cunt of the highest magnitude and a laundry list of deplorable things and generally the second worst human to Hitler so far, but douchebag has a certain je ne sais quoi that Elon takes the cake on.

Drake will always be my #1 douchebag. He lives in this country now. 

  • Hook 'Em 1
Posted

Since November, the creator of 'Succession' has written and made a movie called 'Mountainhead' (Take that, Ayn Rand!) that will premiere on HBO this Saturday about techbros trying to take over the world.

Quote

 

From the Creator of ‘Succession,’ a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right
In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premieres on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, “a feeling of nowness.”

He’s succeeded. Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villains. No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day’s news cycle. But art can help; it’s not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy.

In “Mountainhead,” three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hanger-on they call Souper, short for “soup kitchen,” because he’s a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic, juvenile Venis — the richest man in the world — has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deepfakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes or desecrating sacred sites, and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internecine violence turns into apocalyptic global instability.

It’s not a far-fetched premise. Facebook posts accusing Muslims of rape have already helped fuel a genocide in Myanmar, and tools like those that Venis unleashes seem more likely to be months than years away.

Venis’s foil is Jeff, who has built an A.I. that can filter truth from falsehood and whose flashes of conscience put him at odds with the others. Rounding out the quartet is Randall, a venture capitalist — played by a terrific Steve Carell — who pontificates like the bastard offspring of the investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

As the planet melts down, they start fantasizing about taking over “a couple of failing nations” and running them like start-ups. “We intellectually and financially back a rolling swap-out to crypto network states, populations love it, and it snowballs,” says Randall. But as the global crisis spirals and the dread specter of regulation appears, their ambitions expand. The group seems to have a good relationship with the unnamed president, but they also regard him as an idiot. After the president chastises Venis, they start thinking about replacing him. Given the administration’s “wobbles,” Venis asks, “do we just get upstream, leverage our hardware, software, data, scale this up and coup out the U.S.?”

While “Succession” was a series about a media industry in decline, “Mountainhead” is a movie about men who feel they own the future. This is what makes them — both the fictional characters and their real-world analogues — frightening. At a moment when our institutions are in free fall and most elites seem dazed, these men are ready, as the Silicon Valley cliché says, to move fast and break things. “Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?” asks Randall. Venis, like Elon Musk, longs to leave Earth itself behind. “I just feel like if I could get us off this rock, it would solve so much,” he says, using an obscenity.

Some of the ideas in “Mountainhead” had been percolating in Armstrong’s mind since 2023, when he reviewed Michael Lewis’s book about Sam Bankman-Fried for The Times Literary Supplement, and proceeded to devour a bunch of other books about Silicon Valley. “I was able to read widely about Zuckerberg and Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel,” he said, eventually borrowing from all of them as he crafted his characters. He also listened to techcentric podcasts like Lex Fridman’s and “All-In,” one of whose hosts, David Sacks, is now the White House’s crypto czar. People on these shows often speak in a sort of patois loaded with insider references and futuristic nonsense, delivered with blithe confidence that the rules of computer coding can be easily applied to human society. It’s a tone that Armstrong nails with uncanny precision.

“I think they think that their philosophical approach can solve any problem,” Armstrong said of the tech barons. “And I find that amusing and scary.”

It’s an open question, in “Mountainhead,” how seriously we should take the men’s scheming. The characters are titanically arrogant, but outside their domains, they are not particularly effectual. “There’s a lot of society and government which is not amenable to a tech approach,” said Armstrong. “DOGE may have discovered that, and so may anyone who tries to engage with systems with a lot of real human beings in them.”

Still, America’s tech plutocrats have expansive plans, fortunes that make Gilded Age robber barons look like paupers and an ungodly amount of political power, even now that Musk has stepped back from the White House. The “big, beautiful bill” that the House just passed contains a 10-year moratorium on state A.I. regulation. Musk’s company SpaceX is a front-runner for the contract to build Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense shield. When the president went to Saudi Arabia this month, he brought a passel of tech executives with him.

Journalists can write exposés about these men, just as they have about the family of Rupert Murdoch, on whom “Succession” was based. But art and entertainment can make such figures feel real in a more visceral, emotional way. That’s one reason it’s important for pop culture to engage with America’s disorienting descent into clownish authoritarianism.

Doing so isn’t easy; Trump is eager to punish both media companies and artists that displease him. Two weeks ago, after Bruce Springsteen denounced the administration on his European tour, the president wrote online that he should “KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the country,” adding, in what sounded like a veiled threat, “Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

“Mountainhead” isn’t about Trump, but it is about people to whom he’s given nearly free rein. Considering how cowardly many media executives have been about crossing the president, I wondered if Armstrong had any problem getting the movie made. He said, however, that HBO was supportive: “Maybe they had some qualms, but I’ve never felt the vibrations myself.” I hope audiences reward the network for that. “Mountainhead” is the first movie I’ve seen about now, but many more should follow.

 

 

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Like 1
Posted
3 minutes ago, Chopper said:

Overall EV sales in Europe are up by 33% year over year (for April). 

Tesla sales in Europe are down by 49% in the same period.

Tesla sold just 7,261 vehicles in Europe in all of April 2025.

image.thumb.png.be155e1fabd643aec5a454ae5d09a63f.png

https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/tesla-tsla-keeps-getting-worse-in-europe-despite-electric-car-sales-surging/

 

"Hey, Western Europe.  I hate you all, hate you having functioning democracies, and will pour enormous resources into empowering the same kind of xenophobic fascist bullshit that led to the continent being a shitload of smoldering rubble 80 years ago.  Wait, what's that?  You don't like me and don't want to spend any money with me?  Well, who could have seen that coming?"

  • Hook 'Em 3
  • Like 1
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
Posted
3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

"Hey, Western Europe.  I hate you all, hate you having functioning democracies, and will pour enormous resources into empowering the same kind of xenophobic fascist bullshit that led to the continent being a shitload of smoldering rubble 80 years ago.  Wait, what's that?  You don't like me and don't want to spend any money with me?  Well, who could have seen that coming?"

“Didn’t you see me tour the death camps with my 3 y o on my shoulders like it was EuroDisney? Didn’t that make up for funding and advocating for AfD?”

  • Hook 'Em 3
  • Rage+1 3
Posted
26 minutes ago, Chopper said:

Overall EV sales in Europe are up by 33% year over year (for April). 

Tesla sales in Europe are down by 49% in the same period.

Tesla sold just 7,261 vehicles in Europe in all of April 2025.

image.thumb.png.be155e1fabd643aec5a454ae5d09a63f.png

https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/tesla-tsla-keeps-getting-worse-in-europe-despite-electric-car-sales-surging/

 

 

To quote the great Artie from The Larry Sanders Show: 

"When you act like an asshole, people tend to think of you as an asshole."

 

  • Hook 'Em 3
Posted (edited)

It's honestly kind of confusing to me because what they've done with the first stage is actually astounding from an engineering standpoint. They're having fatal failures during the second stage before re-entry on things which should be comparatively very easy problems to solve and it keeps blowing up.

e: Today's failure was literally just attitude control. A relatively minor problem compared to the ones they've already solved. So weird.

Edited by Brian Fantana
  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
Posted
37 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Didn’t Elon say he was going to be on this flight?

He said he'd be on "the next one to the moon." Which means never because

1. You can't be on the next one if there's never been a first one

2. Even still, there will never be a first one.

3. He's a liar. 

4.

 image.png.762fd316692324db170faeed1153b306.png

image.png.cfdcd9db3c926d7ed483ba65f8e80713.png

  • Hook 'Em 2
  • Haha 3
Posted
1 hour ago, Brian Fantana said:

It's honestly kind of confusing to me because what they've done with the first stage is actually astounding from an engineering standpoint. They're having fatal failures during the second stage before re-entry on things which should be comparatively very easy problems to solve and it keeps blowing up.

e: Today's failure was literally just attitude control. A relatively minor problem compared to the ones they've already solved. So weird.

I don't think you can call failing to achieve orbit and then blowing up a minor problem, sir.

 

Posted
3 minutes ago, Chopper said:

I don't think you can call failing to achieve orbit and then blowing up a minor problem, sir.

I'm not sure you even read my post to be honest. 

First off, it did achieve orbit so I'm not sure what you mean there. It experienced a loss of attitude control during the second stage prior to re-entry, which is a problem way down on the difficulty scale from problems they've already solved on this particular platform, it's not what you would expect to happen, hence my confusion.

Cursed ass platform.

Posted (edited)
27 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

I'm not sure you even read my post to be honest. 

First off, it did achieve orbit so I'm not sure what you mean there. It experienced a loss of attitude control during the second stage prior to re-entry, which is a problem way down on the difficulty scale from problems they've already solved on this particular platform, it's not what you would expect to happen, hence my confusion.

Cursed ass platform.

I have no idea why you'd make that strange accusation.

image.thumb.png.ca17ff68c8597e4e507a982e09e671ad.png

Oh well. So close! (Right?) I'm sure the problems were very minor and they'll get 'em next time /s

and lol at Reuters use of "speedy" for a project overdue and over-budget.

edit - link https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/spacexs-starship-spins-out-of-control-after-flying-past-points-of-previous-failures/ar-AA1FBSAu

and wth, for good measure

 

Edited by Chopper
  • Haha 2
Posted
11 minutes ago, Chopper said:

I have no idea why you'd make that strange accusation.

image.thumb.png.ca17ff68c8597e4e507a982e09e671ad.png

Oh well. So close! (Right?) I'm sure the problems were very minor and they'll get 'em next time /s

and lol at Reuters use of "speedy" for a project overdue and over-budget.

edit - link https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/spacexs-starship-spins-out-of-control-after-flying-past-points-of-previous-failures/ar-AA1FBSAu

and wth, for good measure

 

I'm not sure what you're trying to do or say here. Nothing you posted refutes or even makes an argument against anything I said, and you seem to be completely stunlocked by the word "minor", not at all actually understanding what I'm actually saying.

Are you ok?

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Fuck You 1
Posted

9 test flights

0 successful missions

They haven't even tried launching with anything close to a full payload yet

Successfully created euphemism for the catastrophic explosion and disintegration of their spacecraft

$38 Billion taxpayer funds down the drain, and counting

Fantana, are you illiterate? Are you the dude who was trying to get Shotwell to suck your dick?

 

 

Posted

Dude, are you drunk? This is one of the weirdest, most unnecessarily aggro interactions I've ever had on this site.

Let me explain what I am talking about in smaller words and larger type for you, maybe that will help:

SpaceX solve big, hard problems for rocket stage one. Rocket go to orbit. Stage one good. Different, less hard problem to solve in stage two make rocket go spin spin and boom boom before rocket try to come home. Stage two bad. Brian no understand why SpaceX no can solve small problem when it solve big problem before. Brian know Starship go boom 9 times, Brian post about it here. Brian no say Starship good. Starship bad, no work, very big money go bye bye. Very bad. Brian no defend Starship. Chopper dumb, make bad post. Please no more bad post. Hurt Brian brain.

Posted (edited)
21 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

Dude, are you drunk? This is one of the weirdest, most unnecessarily aggro interactions I've ever had on this site.

Let me explain what I am talking about in smaller words and larger type for you, maybe that will help:

SpaceX solve big, hard problems for rocket stage one. Rocket go to orbit. Stage one good. Different, less hard problem to solve in stage two make rocket go spin spin and boom boom before rocket try to come home. Stage two bad. Brian no understand why SpaceX no can solve small problem when it solve big problem before. Brian know Starship go boom 9 times, Brian post about it here. Brian no say Starship good. Starship bad, no work, very big money go bye bye. Very bad. Brian no defend Starship. Chopper dumb, make bad post. Please no more bad post. Hurt Brian brain.

tsdr

I think you should spend more time penning love letters to Shotwell.

aww - you think everything I've posted was a post in response to you. Ego much, dipshit?

Edited by Chopper
Posted
Just now, Chopper said:

tsdr

I think you should spend more time penning love letters to Shotwell.

Ok this is getting a little pathetic. 

You should probably stop schizo posting at me for literally no reason, and maybe drop your weird sexual fixation on that woman. Seriously.

Literally all I did was wonder aloud about technical aspects of the flight and why they can't seem to solve problems that should be less complex than ones they already have solved. That's it. You're the one losing your fucking mind for some reason.

I genuinely cannot fathom what possibly could have set you off to this degree.

Posted (edited)
On 5/23/2025 at 1:30 PM, Prepuce of Doom said:

I've said it before and I'll undoubtedly say it again - the bar right next to the Spirit gates at MSY is one of the best people-watching locations in the country. 

Always thought we should do a Surly Spirit National tour. Fly spirit to the shittiest of places like orlando, tampa, atlanta, etc. And document the whole thing. 

Who will volunteer as trubute?

Edited by MissingInAction
  • Haha 1
Posted
1 hour ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

Elon:  the ultimate aggy. 

 

1 hour ago, Sawbonz said:

And yet stock price keeps going up

 

Hey - aggy still sell t-shirts too.

In the end his followers still believe and trust in "NEXT YEAR!", despite the fact that it's been "next year" for well over a decade. This time it's different, so the stock price surges.

 

Posted
13 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

It's honestly kind of confusing to me because what they've done with the first stage is actually astounding from an engineering standpoint. They're having fatal failures during the second stage before re-entry on things which should be comparatively very easy problems to solve and it keeps blowing up.

e: Today's failure was literally just attitude control. A relatively minor problem compared to the ones they've already solved. So weird.

When your model is fail and then fix, where is the incentive to attempt to fix things before they fail?  Or the corporate allowance to spend money polishing something before it’s the fail point?

Posted
7 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

When your model is fail and then fix, where is the incentive to attempt to fix things before they fail?  Or the corporate allowance to spend money polishing something before it’s the fail point?

It's an interesting question, especially when you compare the design to the Saturn V rocket, which never experienced a catastrophic failure. Its design was as simple and straightforward as possible, and whereas Starship's seems far too complex and contains far too many potential failure points for a rocket of that size that is intended to be reusable. Saturn V was also a much more widespread, collaborative effort with literally thousands of companies and something like half a million people working on it at its peak.

What I was saying before Captain Crazy started teeing off on me was that I would still maintain that stage one of Starship is a huge engineering feat that could contribute greatly to future vehicle design but there seem to be too many potential points of failure in stage two that they keep running into that can and do cause catastrophic failures. At this point, the project has to be deemed a failure and I'm not sure how that reality will impact spaceflight as a whole going forward.

  • Hook 'Em 2
Posted
26 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

What I was saying before Captain Crazy started teeing off on me

jesus, dude, I thought maybe you'd sleep it off...you started it with an attack. If you are able to handle counterpoints or debate then maybe just stick with facts instead of insinuating that someone can't read. 

Posted
Just now, Chopper said:

jesus, dude, I thought maybe you'd sleep it off...you started it with an attack. If you are able to handle counterpoints or debate then maybe just stick with facts instead of insinuating that someone can't read. 

What are you even trying to say? Everyone is either yapping about technical details and/or teeing off on Elon's stupid ass. What is there to debate or argue? You seem to want to debate about something but have yet to even offer a single counterpoint or argument about anything. Can you help me understand or do you just want to weirdly insinuate I want to fuck Gwynne Shotwell again or something?

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



×
×
  • Create New...