0.0 Context Setting

Friday, November 18, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and I am slowly still getting better from covid.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 This isn’t an HBR case study, this is a hundreds of millions of dollars new campus of Look At This Fucking Guy

Honestly, I really hate to do this and yet I’m going to do it anyway.

Today’s episode is “this is an explanation of why Elon Musk is a complete fucking idiot”, but instead of composing it here, in iA Writer, I am just going to point you at:

• the first tweet in the thread, which is probably the version if you want the certain je-ne-sais-quois of reading in the original medium, with a sense of the rhythm and pseudo-oral storytelling around a campfire delivery:

I have a theory that many of the people who thought Karen’s purchase of Twitter would work out and would be a good thing have never had to deal with real, painful consequences of being disappointed by someone with power. (me);

• the threadreader version, which is the kind that makes it look like a terrible essay;
• the PDF version, which you can cut-out-and-keep if you’re so inclined.

Oh wait, maybe I should include some high points that would persuade you to read it. How about:

Look, a sign that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and that he’s out of his depth in this particular arena is that what (minimally) arguably worked for cars when he couldn’t make them fast enough was “let’s throw a show in the barn we’re going to put up” and got everyone to come in and work on the assembly line and they banged a few cars out to meet a deadline and sure that was drama and entertainment too, but see, you can’t do that for “how do you maintain and also develop a 16 year old set of products subject to worldwide regulatory compliance being used by hundreds of millions of people every day that honestly, no single person can explain how it all fits together”. You can’t just fucking say “hey everyone we’re just gonna have sleepovers until we’ve written the codes for this” and count the lines of code written. But you could see that from the way he dealt with the assemblyline. Or I could, at any rate. Don’t know about you all.

There. That’s your teaser.

That’s it. Sorry. Can’t believe it’s just a Twitter thread today. That’s just how the world is now.

Best,

Dan