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I gotta admit, if there is anyone I don't want writing bad articles about me it's Drew Magary (of Defector and the SF Gate)

https://www.sfgate.com/streaming/article/alien-earth-elon-musk-sucks-20888757.php

Hollywood’s new favorite villain is THE billionaire CEO

Emphasis is mine, it's not a generic billionaire CEO, it's a particular one (the one you are probably thinking about now)

Quote

In fact, this is the fifth time within a calendar year that I’ve watched a film or TV show where the main villain was an Elon stand-in. I didn’t have to think hard to remember the examples, either:

<insert list of 4 other movie villains>

It’s not new for Hollywood to conjure up villains inspired by the modern CEO. Hell, I remember Jonathan Pryce playing an obvious Rupert Murdoch stand-in in “Tomorrow Never Dies,” one of the lesser Bond films of my time. Elon makes for an even easier template, because he’s one of the most unpopular figures in America, and because he was born into his wealth thanks to a racist daddy. Best of all, he’s an individual person instead of a recognizable nation-state. So HEY PRESTO. Hollywood now has another option outside of “vaguely Eastern European bagman” if they want a villain character who won’t tick off the wrong people. Everyone would like to see Elon Musk die, myself included. And it’s nice to see our leading filmmakers give that desire at least partial recognition.

 

Funny read and review of Alien Earth too.

Quote

 Jonathan Pryce playing an obvious Rupert Murdoch stand-in in “Tomorrow Never Dies,” one of the lesser Bond films of my time.

Top third of the post-1990 Bond films.  And it only gets more and more prescient.

23 hours ago, Captainant said:

literally to feed it into an LLM, I would imagine. Considering he's spent tens of billions of dollars on hardware to do just that sort of thing

possibly but I'd guess the more likely recipient was Palantir, for the surveillance state - the record includes your name, SSN, DOB, place of birth, parents name, gender, and immigration status. 

3 hours ago, Parliament said:

Top third of the post-1990 Bond films.  And it only gets more and more prescient.

You get a hook'em for the 2nd part. But that first part is just wrong.

There is no way that Tomorrow Never Dies is in the top 3 Bond films since 1990 (there have been 9).

 

Skyfall, Casino Royal and No Time to Die.

 

It might not be in the top 6 and its not the best Brosnan Bond film.

1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

 

If only they could calculate how much money is being spent on the portion of disabled vets collecting 100% disability while still working full time jobs and collecting regular paychecks on top of their disability pay. 

  • Popular Post
7 minutes ago, MrBig said:

If only they could calculate how much money is being spent on the portion of disabled vets collecting 100% disability while still working full time jobs and collecting regular paychecks on top of their disability pay. 

You do realize that VA disability is different than SSDI? SSDI is related to one's ability to work and VA disability is related to disabilities from service and not based on the ability to work. 

2 hours ago, MrBig said:

If only they could calculate how much money is being spent on the portion of disabled vets collecting 100% disability while still working full time jobs and collecting regular paychecks on top of their disability pay. 

@swam has been seen. 

11 hours ago, F250 said:

You do realize that VA disability is different than SSDI? SSDI is related to one's ability to work and VA disability is related to disabilities from service and not based on the ability to work. 

While that is no doubt true and I and we as a nation want to tread carefully on veteran's benefits, I know or am aware of vets collecting substantial disability for "aggravation" of existing injuries, ie high school sports or other injuries, and there is a minor industry in helping vets collect extra benefits.

20 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

I gotta admit, if there is anyone I don't want writing bad articles about me it's Drew Magary (of Defector and the SF Gate)

https://www.sfgate.com/streaming/article/alien-earth-elon-musk-sucks-20888757.php

Hollywood’s new favorite villain is THE billionaire CEO

Emphasis is mine, it's not a generic billionaire CEO, it's a particular one (the one you are probably thinking about now)

 

Funny read and review of Alien Earth too.

Met him before at a live podcast he and David Roth did. Those two are my favorite writers on Defector. 

  • Popular Post
14 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

Met him before at a live podcast he and David Roth did.  

Samual Hagar’s podcasts are better.

15 hours ago, F250 said:

You do realize that VA disability is different than SSDI? SSDI is related to one's ability to work and VA disability is related to disabilities from service and not based on the ability to work. 

My brother has 100% disability due to his PTSD from Iraq & Afghanistan. But he works full time as a city patrol police officer while simultaneously collecting his VA disability because of the PTSD. He’s not pushing papers at a desk, he is actively patrolling the streets on night shift and has killed 2 people with justified deadly force (investigations cleared him of any wrongdoing). I’m not saying the shootings aren’t justified and that his PTSD isn’t real, it just doesn’t make sense to me how he could be allowed to do this kind of job based on his PTSD diagnosis. 

2 hours ago, MrBig said:

My brother has 100% disability due to his PTSD from Iraq & Afghanistan. But he works full time as a city patrol police officer while simultaneously collecting his VA disability because of the PTSD. He’s not pushing papers at a desk, he is actively patrolling the streets on night shift and has killed 2 people with justified deadly force (investigations cleared him of any wrongdoing). I’m not saying the shootings aren’t justified and that his PTSD isn’t real, it just doesn’t make sense to me how he could be allowed to do this kind of job based on his PTSD diagnosis. 

That's a police department issue not a VA issue. 

The VA disability is for having to live with PTSD that resulted from his time in the service. 

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

this is a whole thing about Elmo stupidly claiming lidar and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention - "If lidars/radars disagree with cameras, which one wins?"

 

meanwhile https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-call-exit-vehicle

image.png.6f451cfd73fced14394e6b0e7f414038.png

 

 

 

Uh Elmo, you go with the one that actually can tell you an object is SOLID. You don't want to hit things. Vision can be fooled.

What's idiotic about him even tossing out talking points like this is how stupid he sounds when his real reason is a perfectly acceptable answer. 

We all get it, you are going vision only as a cost savings measure. It's a risk, but it's a way to go about this. And if you said "we are doing this because we want to have a low cost answer" we might disagree, but you wouldn't sound like your brain is leaking out of your mouth.

To say "oh this is safer" PUH-LEEZE, do not insult us trying to run that line of bullshit out there. Anyone that knows anything knows that is pure horse shit.

 

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Great quote in that Electrek article:

Quote

Amir Husain, an AI entrepreneur who sits on the Boards of Advisors for IBM Watson and the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin, points to advancements in the use of Kalman filters and Bayesian techniques to solve sensor noise covariance.

He commented on Musk’s statement regarding the use of radar and lidar sensors:

Quote

 

The issue isn’t a binary disagreement between two sensors. It generates a better estimate than any individual sensor can produce on its own. They all have a margin of error. Fusion helps reduce this.

If Musk’s argument held, why would the human brain use eyes, ears, and touch to estimate object location? Why would aircraft combine radar, IRST, and other passive sensors to estimate object location? This is a fundamental misunderstanding of information theory. Every channel has noise. But redundancy reduces uncertainty.

 

 

 

7 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Great quote in that Electrek article:

 

Yeah, but who are you gonna trust....some nerdy actual computer scientist, or a meme-lord who is extreme hardcore?

57 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Yeah, but who are you gonna trust....some nerdy actual computer scientist, or a meme-lord who is extreme hardcore?

Uh Brisket, you go with the one that actually can tell you how algorithms are solid. You don't want to hit things. Hardcore Meme-lords can be redpilled.

17 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

 

“Oh, KEY data.   I thought you said. KEEN data… that data is not so keen for us.”

BTW - the money part of this article is right here (emphasis mine): 

 

Quote

Immediately after the wreck at 9:14 p.m. on April 25, 2019, the crucial data detailing how it unfolded was automatically uploaded to the company’s servers and stored in a vast central database, according to court documents. Tesla’s headquarters soon sent an automated message back to the car confirming that it had received the collision snapshot.

Moments later, court records show, the data was just as automatically “unlinked” from the 2019 Tesla Model S at the scene, meaning the local copy was marked for deletion, a standard practice for Teslas in such incidents, according to court testimony.

In the time between the crash and the hacker’s intervention, according to testimony from a software engineer and manager on the Autopilot team, someone at Tesla probably took “affirmative action to delete” the copy of the data on the company’s central database, too, leaving investigators and the family without the information they believed they needed to piece together what happened.

...

After years of trying and failing to retrieve this data from Tesla, the plaintiffs’ attorneys said, they finally hit a wall in 2024 and were preparing to go to trial without it. But in a last-ditch effort to find the snapshot that summer, they recovered the control units from the Florida Highway Patrol, which still had them in its possession. Then they needed a technical expert to understand and extract what was on them.

That’s when they turned to hacker greentheonly, who had a robust social media following for his work recovering data from damaged Teslas and posting his findings on X.

The hacker was consulting with the plaintiffs’ team when Tesla proposed to the plaintiffs that they power on the Autopilot control unit to determine what data it held — an idea greentheonly vehemently opposed.

“‘Let’s just power it on and update [it] and see what happens,’” he recalled them suggesting. “If I wanted to destroy evidence on the computer, that would be exactly the advice I would give.”

After a lengthy back-and-forth, Tesla and the plaintiffs agreed on terms for the hacker to access the data from the Autopilot unit himself. In October, the plaintiffs’ attorneys flew the hacker down to Miami from his home hundreds of miles away.

Inside a Starbucks near the Miami airport, the plaintiffs’ attorneys watched as greentheonly fired up his ThinkPad computer and plugged in a flash drive containing a forensic copy of the Autopilot unit’s contents. Within minutes, he found key data that was marked for deletion — along with confirmation that Tesla had received the collision snapshot within moments of the crash — proving the critical information should have actually been accessible all along.

The attorneys high-fived behind him.

Over the next few days, the hacker used the data he had found to create an augmented video of the crash that showed in stark detail exactly what the Tesla saw in the moments before the crash.

...

Brett Schreiber, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, had a different interpretation, saying that the vehicle failed to warn McGee the road was ending — and that Tesla had deceived the investigators for years about what data was available even though the company had it “before the cops even arrived on the scene.”

“There’s too much going on here for it to be anything other than intentional,” another plaintiffs’ attorney, Adam Boumel, said in an interview.

 

Edited by Captain Ron

15 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

BTW - the money part of this article is right here (emphasis mine): 

 

 

Let's put it another way: Tesla has institutionalized, as a corporate rule and practice, the spoliation of evidence (legal term for destruction of evidence that a party knows is likely to be relevant to a claim).  In most jurisdictions, that merits an instruction from the court which functionally says "The Defendant intentionally destroyed evidence of this crash.  You are instructed that the evidence was likely to indicate that Defendant was liable, and you may take this instruction into account when assessing liability in your deliberations."

That action (and the corporate policy of immediately deleting such information) is also good evidence of Tesla's fraudulent intent in marketing FSD as an available, safe-to-use product.  

Tesla is a scam and a grift, built on a foundation of fraud and lies, with conscious disregard for human life and safety.  They are serving that case up to plaintiffs' attorneys nationwide on a silver platter.  The really stupid thing is that it didn't have to be that way, but Elon's galaxy-sized ego got in the way.  Tesla could have been a perfectly good car company, making good and safe products, advancing towards FSD at a reasonable speed.  But he had to overpromise, then lie, then conceal the truth, with no regard for safety.

Further, if information, the concealment of which led to human harm/death, was concealed at the instruction of a particular person, that person can and should be subject to criminal charges, up to and including criminally negligent homicide/manslaughter.

Edited by Brisketexan

I would call out our resident Tesla defender, but why bother? He's just going to say something dumb to defend a billionaire that doesn't give 2 shits about him and find a way to make our opinion of him fall even more than we thought possible.

4 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Further, if information, the concealment of which led to human harm/death, was concealed at the instruction of a particular person, that person can and should be subject to criminal charges, up to and including criminally negligent homicide/manslaughter.

Adorable.

Just now, Fudge Nuggets said:

Adorable.

Blue states.

State law charges.

Not pardonable by DOTUS.

2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Blue states.

State law charges.

Not pardonable by DOTUS.

Does

Not

Matter

13 hours ago, Chopper said:

Grok update! Grok is the future!

vid taken on SoCo

 

And still Elon proves he can't build anything that won't crash into something else.

On 8/29/2025 at 12:09 PM, Captain Ron said:

I would call out our resident Tesla defender, but why bother? He's just going to say something dumb to defend a billionaire that doesn't give 2 shits about him and find a way to make our opinion of him fall even more than we thought possible.

Nope... that is wholly fucked up.  No defense for that at all.

1 minute ago, Guadaloopy said:

Nope... that is wholly fucked up.  No defense for that at all.

But do you realize that this (lying and covering up massive failures) isn't what he/Tesla has done....IT IS WHAT THEY ARE.  This is the fundamental nature of what every Musk enterprise is and how it operates.  They are toxic, and should be avoided at all costs.

24 minutes ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:

Super excited about this. It turns out one of my hobbies is getting randomly punched in the face by an airbag when the sun hits the camera just right. 

 

image.thumb.png.f896d40593d30378f232de3397ddbe0f.png

What's important is that all records of your airbag's deployment and the reasons for same will be automatically remotely deleted by Tesla, because oh no reason, they definitely don't have anything to hide.

And if you say otherwise, you are clearly infected with THE WOKE MIND VIRUS.

Why anyone would choose to do business with that fucking lunatic is a mystery to me.

Elmo is reaching for new ways to show the world what a complete fucking moronic bitch he truly is

 

2 hours ago, Chopper said:

Motor Trend with a shot directly across @Guadaloopy's bow https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2023-tesla-model-y-long-range-yearlong-review-update-14-two-year-check-in

Screenshot2025-09-03at10_21_48AM.thumb.png.0b4ee8b77274e87e74ed75f7bc6b5289.png

There’s so much I dislike about the Model Y that I don’t even need to consider the fraught sociopolitical aspects of modern Tesla ownership. 

Cool.  I have anecdotes and opinions, too!

4 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

Cool.  I have anecdotes and opinions, too!

Do you write for Motortrend?

11 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

Cool.  I have anecdotes and opinions, too!

You mad gif

  • Popular Post
3 hours ago, Chopper said:

Elmo is reaching for new ways to show the world what a complete fucking moronic bitch he truly is

 

My brother has been MAGA since 2016. It wasn’t until a few years ago he went full Elon and got super jacked on T and HGH. I thought it was a mid-life crisis thing, but it turns out he did it the second his Mexican-American son decided to grow out his hair and asked to go to therapy to explore his feelings of being trans. So how does Elon explain that in a non-White person? The look on my brother’s face when I said his hormones were gender affirming care was priceless. 

On 8/29/2025 at 11:50 AM, Brisketexan said:

Let's put it another way: Tesla has institutionalized, as a corporate rule and practice, the spoliation of evidence (legal term for destruction of evidence that a party knows is likely to be relevant to a claim).  In most jurisdictions, that merits an instruction from the court which functionally says "The Defendant intentionally destroyed evidence of this crash.  You are instructed that the evidence was likely to indicate that Defendant was liable, and you may take this instruction into account when assessing liability in your deliberations."

That action (and the corporate policy of immediately deleting such information) is also good evidence of Tesla's fraudulent intent in marketing FSD as an available, safe-to-use product.  

Tesla is a scam and a grift, built on a foundation of fraud and lies, with conscious disregard for human life and safety.  They are serving that case up to plaintiffs' attorneys nationwide on a silver platter.  The really stupid thing is that it didn't have to be that way, but Elon's galaxy-sized ego got in the way.  Tesla could have been a perfectly good car company, making good and safe products, advancing towards FSD at a reasonable speed.  But he had to overpromise, then lie, then conceal the truth, with no regard for safety.

Further, if information, the concealment of which led to human harm/death, was concealed at the instruction of a particular person, that person can and should be subject to criminal charges, up to and including criminally negligent homicide/manslaughter.

Y'know, all this was foreshadowed when the future tech plutocrats thought they didn't need patents, or to avoid infringing patents, or do anything any of the other bricks and mortar businesses did because "disruption."

These fuckers are the embodiment of stupid libertarians and laws for thee but not for me.

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