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Elon Musk officially buys Twitter, DONE DEAL !

Not really, Elon still has a way out, albeit an unlikely one (if they banks dont follow through, apparently, I'm just parroting and its not black & white).

Depending on what investors think the real twtr value is, market believes it to be 80-90% likely it goes through.

Elon said they'll appeal if theyre forced to buy after trial, so there might still be supreme court and shit.

So yeah, technically, no

fine, I'll wait !
 
A company closely affiliated with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk wants to dump thousands of gallons of treated wastewater in Texas’ Colorado River.

The company, Gapped Bass LLC, asked to dump up to 142,500 gallons of treated wastewater a day at its property in Bastrop near the river, according to public filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Bastrop — about 30 miles southeast of Austin — is home to a part of the Colorado River that starts in West Texas and flows 800 miles before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.
The request from Gapped Bass comes a year after Musk, Tesla’s co-founder and CEO, moved his automaker’s corporate headquarters to Austin.

The request also provides a small glimpse into Musk’s growing Texas empire.

Last year, Musk’s transportation and infrastructure company, the Boring Company, purchased 73 acres in northwest Bastrop County, according to media reports at the time.

Filings didn’t name Boring, but rather Gapped Bass. Property records show the Boring Company and Gapped Bass share an address.

They also share executives. Steve Davis, president of the Boring Company, is listed as manager of Gapped Bass. Adam Pashaian, corporate controller for the Boring Company, is a registered agent for Gapped Bass.


"gapped bass" huh, wow
 
Blocking someone isn't censorship

Elon covering his ears is not the same as covering someone's mouth
If it was ONLY Elon who could see the posts, then your statement would be accurate. Then that would be like him blocking someone from sending him PMs.

But on Twitter, when someone tweets responses to his bullshit, it is PUBLIC. So yes, in a way it is censorship because he is not allowing people to publicly express their opinions and rebuttals directly to his sometimes outlandish statements. Further, when blocked, he is also preventing the same people from directly seeing his tweets.

Any more mental gymnastics to try to justify Elon being a hypocrite?
 
If it was ONLY Elon who could see the posts, then your statement would be accurate. Then that would be like him blocking someone from sending him PMs.

But on Twitter, when someone tweets responses to his bullshit, it is PUBLIC. So yes, in a way it is censorship because he is not allowing people to publicly express their opinions and rebuttals directly to his sometimes outlandish statements. Further, when blocked, he is also preventing the same people from directly seeing his tweets.

Any more mental gymnastics to try to justify Elon being a hypocrite?
"in a way it is censorship because he is not allowing people to publicly express their opinions and rebuttals directly to his sometimes outlandish statements".
They can just take a pic and post it on their Twitter... They can also see his tweets, just open a new tab.... It has absolutely nothing to do with censorship. Nowhere does it say that free speech is giving everyone the right to force you to "look at my comment dumbass, look at it!"

This commonly made argument is just nonsense imo. Unless made in a lighthearted way alluding to Musks own echo chamber, pettiness, or own past of dealing with criticism and people that cross him.
 
"in a way it is censorship because he is not allowing people to publicly express their opinions and rebuttals directly to his sometimes outlandish statements".
They can just take a pic and post it on their Twitter... They can also see his tweets, just open a new tab.... It has absolutely nothing to do with censorship. Nowhere does it say that free speech is giving everyone the right to force you to "look at my comment dumbass, look at it!"

This commonly made argument is just nonsense imo. Unless made in a lighthearted way alluding to Musks own echo chamber, pettiness, or own past of dealing with criticism and people that cross him.
I'm just saying if Musk was such a champion of free speech, why does he have to block people who disagree with him? Isn't that the same thing he is accusing Twitter of doing by banning Trump? Seems like more mental gymnastics by saying someone can "take a pic and copy it on their twitter." What a PITA. If it wasn't censorship he would rebut the statement like everyone else does. But no, he is blocking them from reading his statements directly from his account and from replying to him.

And we all know Trump was banned not for his crazy opinions but for using Twitter to incite violence and an insurrection against our capitol. But Musk and his apologists insist the ban is partisan, which it isn't. And I'm saying Musk blocking people is petty and also partisan, which he and his apologists say it isn't. Like I said, hypocrisy.
 
I'm just saying if Musk was such a champion of free speech, why does he have to block people who disagree with him? Isn't that the same thing he is accusing Twitter of doing by banning Trump? Seems like more mental gymnastics by saying someone can "take a pic and copy it on their twitter." What a PITA. If it wasn't censorship he would rebut the statement like everyone else does. But no, he is blocking them from reading his statements directly from his account and from replying to him.
Because their tweets probably bother him or something. He's not known at all to take criticism well, still, not contrary to the definition of being pro free speech. And not everyone else rebuts every statement, guy receives thousands of comments daily, and I can assure you that the large majority is not very clever.
Not wanting to see tweets from others and disallowing what he perceives as trolls from commenting has absolutely nothing to do with free speech, zero, nothing. If it were a public and not a private account like the @POTUS account or something, maybe you have a point. Now you're just way off my man, I'm still scratching my head.

Let me be clear, I don't believe in Musk as thé defender of free speech, at all. He's a narcissistic clown, as evidenced by his whole body of statements, tweets, podcasts, anything really. "solve free speech" only a clown would say that.
We'll see what he does with Twitter, I think it'll be a mess personally. And Twitter being the start of the "everything app" will never happen.
 
He never cared about the environment, not one bit, it's part of the grift

Also this: https://esghound.substack.com/p/spacex-4-the-oil-and-gas-production

esghound?

Environmental &
Social
Governence :sick:

I was so for a green revolution until I realised they'd managed yet another slight of hand wallstreet scam. Went to university for this stuff and always found it odd that the sustainability course was about NGO's and other such exciting topics.

As I heard recently, "your revolution will be hijacked"

Without reading that link, it blew my mind that Musk trades/buys carbon credits to offset values.

Absolute corruption.

SUSTAINABILITY
Want To Understand Carbon Credits? Read This

Erik Kobayashi-Solomon

Investor in climate change adaptation and mitigation businesses
Mar 13, 2020,10:07am EDT
This article is more than 2 years old.
You know from my first article in this series that forestry and land-use innovations represent a uniquely efficient way to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. After reading through my second article in this series, you know about compliance and voluntary carbon offset markets and the basic mechanics of cap-and-trade.

By the time you finish this article, you will understand how carbon offset credits (a/k/a “carbon offsets”, “carbon credits”) work and see examples of how credits are generated in both the compliance and voluntary markets. Along the way, you’ll learn about some of the innovative business opportunities in this emerging field — a field that has the mother of all tailwinds supporting future demand.

The Compliance Market at Work

The compliance markets start with interactions between large institutions – industrial manufacturers and other enterprises.

Let’s continue with our example from the last article and further assume that the business allotted 100 units of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in one year is a cement manufacturer.

CEMEX's Monterrey plant
A cement plant in Monterrey, Mexico operated
960x0.jpg

Under a business-as-usual scenario, the cement company could expect to emit 120 units of GHGs. In the long-term, the goal is for the manufacturer to find ways of producing cement without emitting as many GHGs; to meet its regulatory burden in the short-term, it will need to buy carbon offsets to bring its emissions down to its mandate of 100 units.

At the same time a large landowner – International Paper IP, a timberland investment management organization (TIMO) like Weyerhaeuser WY, or even an educational institution like Middlebury College – owns timberland that has the potential to be monetized by harvesting for homebuilding or the pulp and paper industry.

If the landowner agrees to forgo aggressive timber harvesting on a certain track of land in perpetuity, it can receive an offset credit that it can sell to the cement manufacturer. The landowner can generate cold, hard cash; the cement manufacturer can meet its regulatory mandate.

View_of_Waldo_Lake,_Willamette_National_Forest
View of Waldo Lake, Willamette National ForestUS FOREST SERVICE
The landowner must jump through some regulatory hoops to make that offset process happen. It also probably needs help in planning the timber conservation project so it generates the maximum amount of credits possible.

To get this very specialized help, our landowner would turn to an adviser with deep experience in carbon offset regulations and markets.

One of the most important companies in this advisory niche is Bluesource, which operates a full-service environmental markets firm from offices in the U.S. and Canada. Bluesource is the largest environmental projects developer in the U.S. and also finds buyers for the emission credits generated by smaller developers’ projects.

Bluesource derives a fee for advising clients and developing projects, and also takes a cut of revenues generated in the sale of others’ credits. They say that there are riches in niches, and Bluesource’s niche is one with the mother of all tailwinds as politicians and businessmen begin to wake themselves to the necessity of taking action to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The landowner in our example works with Bluesource to develop a project and register it as adhering to one of several carbon offset Standards. Each Standard has a particular set of rules or “protocols” that sets out how carbon credits will be assigned to different types of projects based on various criteria.

Standards can be government agencies (in the case of compliance markets) or non-profit organizations (which provide services for both compliance and voluntary markets).

Some examples of private Standards are the Climate Action Reserve, American Carbon Registry (managed by Winrock), and the Verified Carbon Standard (managed by Verra). The organizations behind the standards generate fees from managing the certifications of projects as well as handling the logistics of issuing and retiring credits.

All high-quality projects are subject to review by third-party auditing firms. These firms, a list of which you can find on Climate Action Reserve’s website, validate projects up front, then verify that the validated projects continue to operate in accordance with the protocol on an ongoing basis.

Once the landowner’s conservation project is independently verified, the appropriate regulatory agency (such as the California Air Standards Board) reviews the project, makes sure it adheres to its regulatory requirements, and checks that the verification was done by approved providers. Once these checks are made, the Standards organization issues it serial-numbered carbon credits which can be sold to the cement manufacturer to allow the latter to meet its regulatory requirements in the short-term.

As an aside, when an end user like you or I rent a car and choose to spend $4.99 per day on carbon offsets, we’re actually buying carbon offsets from a retailer. For-profit carbon credit retailers (e.g., TerraPass and atmosfair) make money just the same way Wal-Mart does – they buy credits in the wholesale market from a developer like Bluesource, packages them into bite-sized portions, and offers them to consumers at a mark-up.

(Cool Effect is another company acting as a carbon credit retailer, but operates on a non-profit basis — charging fees just sufficient to offset its operating costs.)

The EU ETS and the Californian compliance markets are hugely important in driving down carbon emissions and have spurred a trend to rethink the way timberlands are managed and agricultural assets are operated.

Haters will say that the entire framework for carbon credits is flawed and point to obvious historical problems in the carbon markets.

It is true that mistakes were made in the early markets. Clever people exploited loopholes before they could be closed. Fraudsters sold the same credits twice and charged EU Value Added Tax (VAT) on both the buyer and seller leg. Oversupply of credits from ex-Soviet Bloc countries that far outstripped demand from Western Europe caused the prices of certain credits to crash.

However, the thing that has impressed me about these markets is how well the organizers learned from these mistakes and adroitly adapted to make the markets more effective as time went on. They closed the gaps and succeeded in building a framework that has allowed for the growth of a vibrant new set of business opportunities.

Voluntary Markets Add “Co-Benefit” Advantages into the Mix

Voluntary markets function in a similar way to compliance markets with a few notable exceptions. First, as the name implies, the institutions participating in this market are doing so voluntarily, not as a means to comply with some regulatory mandate.

Recently, you have read about commitments made by such giants as Microsoft, Amazon, L’Oreal, and others to transition their operations to some form of carbon neutrality (i.e., emitting zero net GHGs) or carbon negativity (i.e., sequestering more net GHGs than they produce) in the near future.

The cynic might say that these commitments are mere PR stunts enacted during the longest, strongest economic expansion in modern times by managers who can afford to make such plans when their companies’ profitability is at historic highs.

However, from the perspective of your realist correspondent, while public relations certainly does play some role in these companies’ strategic planning processes, the managers at these firms also realize that profits and stock prices are an outgrowth of a stable, wealthy population able to pay taxes for modern infrastructure projects as well as buy consumer products. This type of stable operating environment is placed into doubt when one considers the worst-case climate possibilities, so managers understand that it is in their own best interest to mitigate worst-case scenarios.

This attitude has historical precedence – Henry Ford, for all his faults, knew that if everyone in society were to be able to afford an automobile, workers’ wages would have to rise. Ford Motor doubled daily wages to its employees compared to contemporary averages and, in so doing, bootstrapped not only a new industry, but a new economic model based on mass consumerism.

Henry Ford's first factory on Bagley St, DetroitWIKIPEDIA.ORG
Another important role that voluntary markets serve is to offer credit purchasers what is known as “co-benefits”.

An untouched stand of trees in Oregon – as in our compliance market example above – generates one big benefit – the carbon sequestered in the living trees themselves. However, voluntary development projects may offer other social or environmental benefits in addition to lowering GHG emissions, such as poverty reduction, habitat preservation, and increases to local living standards.

These are all benefits that support U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, so a company able to tout participation in programs with co-benefits scores valuable PR wins for its shareholders.

For example, one of Bluesource’s founders helped start a venture named the Paradigm Project to subsidize highly efficient wood-burning stoves and easy to use water filtration units to rural families in Kenya. In Kenya, as is true for other less developed rural areas, a lot of deforestation is brought about by families cutting wood to boil water and cook.

Through projects developed by the Paradigm Project, organizations are able to invest in carbon credits generated by verified emission reductions from rural households’ reduced burning of wood for fuel.

Proceeds from the sale of those carbon credits are plowed into to the operations of a company that employs local people to build stoves and filters and distributes these products to their rural neighbors. The filters help cut the amount of firewood needed for boiling water and the stoves are much more efficient at converting wood fuel into usable energy.


One co-benefit of this program is that the purchasers of the carbon offsets end up improving the health conditions and economic situations of rural Kenyans – through a reduction in indoor air pollution and freeing up time and / or money that would otherwise go to collecting or purchasing firewood.

As an additional co-benefit, the project helps support women’s empowerment as women make up the bulk of the workforce that sells and distributes the cook stoves. Again, what company looking to expand its reputation and global reach would not jump at a project like this?

Everyone in this voluntary credit value chain is doing well by doing good. Further proof, if proof were needed, that the economic manifestation of the human species’ wonderful adaptability – capitalism – offers a path to increased well-being at the local and the global level.

Intelligent investors take note.
 
Nah, he doesn't have a vision for the world. Just some blabla about how we need to be a multiplanetary species and how AI will be the greatest threat to humanity. And some shit about living in a simulation.
I never understood how Musk says AI will be such threat yet simultaneously wants to put a chip in our brain. Sounds like a back door to directly injecting AI into human brains.
 
I never understood how Musk says AI will be such threat yet simultaneously wants to put a chip in our brain. Sounds like a back door to directly injecting AI into human brains.
Because he's a mong appealing to young mongs with no discernment, helped on by other mongs like Joe Rogan and stupid Hollywood predictive programming like Iron Man (in which he appears btw).

The guy talks out of his arse. No different to Bill Gates talking about medical matters he has no remit to talk about. Both are cardboard cut-outs for the military industrial complex. People just don't want to see or hear that because people are so desperate for hero/saviour figures, and because people don't want to contemplate such dominance by the establishment. Unfortunately it's true though.

You don't get to do rocket launches into space or put thousands of satellites up in space without the DoD and Pentagon being actively involved in the project. Fly a drone too high or in the wrong airspace and you're going to get fucked over by the establishment. Space is another ballpark entirely, due to existing satellites and who knows what else floating up there. It is tightly controlled by the military.

The guy is a shill. Putting batteries into cars isn't revolutionary. It's fucking retarded.
 
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