CNN Exclusive: 'How am I in this war?': New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire's Ukraine dilemma | CNN Politics
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Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”

of course he was afraid of russian nuukes. this only prompted Ukrainian engineers to bypass use of starlink entirely and current sea drones, like the one used in second Kerch bridge strike, or these used against SIG tanker and Olenegorsky Gornyak landing ship use domestic technology only

    • Poppy But Hornier@cdrom.tokyo
      1·
      1 year ago

      @downpunxx @skillissuer “Great idea to let companies continue to have a monopoly on a resource instead of nationalizing it. They totally won’t take advantage of being the only real option for people and not being controlled by the government (and therefore accountable to the people).”

      And people are still not suspicious with what Elon is doing??? :neofox_angry:

      • downpunxx@kbin.social
        0·
        1 year ago

        not a fan of lemmy, probably having something to do with the fact it’s namesake was a man who owned the largest personal collection of nazi memorabilia for years until he died, so, tough titty i guess

      • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        lemmy is the mastodon of the threadiverse in that it invents a standard and expects everyone to follow it and because it’s the largest of it’s type you can’t really do anything about it

        i bet what’s going on is that kbin is attaching images in the mastodon/microblog way and lemmy expects inline markdown images and doesn’t try to extract the attached images.

        (fun fact: lemmy custom emojis are just “macros” for markdown images and not real emojis like the rest of the fedi standardized on (which is how you get things like the hexbear problem of remote emojis being gigantic))

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          lemmy has a lot of questionable design decisions, and the justifications I’ve seen for them on GitHub have very frequently been disappointing

          on the other hand, it’s a lot easier for me to understand and modify lemmy’s rust-based stack than it is for me to comprehend the PHP kbin is written in, which is a big part of why this instance ended up with lemmy

          with that said, holy fuck am I looking forward to contributing to a lemmy fork with better development priorities one of these days

          • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            i’d love to take a peek at a “glitch-soc for lemmy” but not that many people seem keen enough to fork and take on the responsibility of maintaining the jank.

            that said i know of at least 2 instance specific forks (pawb.social’s and programming.dev’s), yet neither of them seem to have produced anything worthwhile just yet.

            • self@awful.systemsEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I’m in a similar boat. ours is also a minor instance-specific fork, though trying to get our changes upstreamed is on my todo list (as are more changes — it’s kind of amazing how threadbare lemmy’s mod tools are, when a lot of them wouldn’t even be hard to implement)

    • Mark vW@mastodon.world
      01·
      1 year ago

      @downpunxx LOL. That would be Musk’s wildest dream. The just compensation he would get would be astounding. Better to tax his space stuff…enough so that we could afford the regulatory apparatus sufficient to protect ourselves from it…

      • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        There’s a SCOTUS case that says the government only has to pay a fair market value, not the “inflated by the government’s need for the property” value. In the case a guy had bought a tugboat and fixed it up quite a bit. When WW2 started the government sought to buy it, and he insisted on a price well above the cost of the boat and the improvements, arguing that WW2 had increased demand so he should get a higher price.

        So Musk would get a lot, but maybe not as much you’d think.

        • Mark vW@mastodon.world
          12·
          1 year ago

          @jonhendry Yeah…but such a trial may require a jury, and that uncertainty very often ups the market value considerably above FMV. It would be stupid to nationalize, given the property is not unique (like real property), presents no barrier to entry. Besides, regulation and taxation are available.

        • Mark vW@mastodon.world
          12·
          1 year ago

          @jonhendry Another huge reason why nationalization would be really stupid. Starlink’s value can be dichotomized into two categories: (1) Business activity that conflicts with US foreign policy, and (2) Business activity that doesn’t conflict with US foreign policy. I suspect the latter value vastly exceeds the former value. In a condemnation proceeding, the US would have to buy the whole kit and kaboodle–what a waste. Then…managing Starlink’s business as a federal entity (wtf?)…

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            it’s weird that the only thing you’ve posted in this thread is links to wav files of the sound of guillotine blades cutting through the air