All you need to know about Twitter

From Mark Cuban 

Evolution of free speech

by Adam Zyglis 

Last post on Xitter

I myself left Xitter a while ago, deleting both my accounts.

I wish I'd been as eloquent as George Monbiot. This is his last post on that platform:

Here, broken down into a thread, is a copy of my last post on X. 

1. This is my farewell post. I am not deleting this account, as I don’t want to lose the archive, and I don’t want my name taken by imposters. But, for as long as Musk owns the platform, I’ll no longer use it.

2. Since Elon Musk bought X, he has transformed it from one on which millions could converse as equals into his personal megaphone. Now the world’s richest man uses it to wage his class war, transferring blame for the ills of capitalism onto vulnerable minorities ....

3. .... boosting the grimmest and most antisocial accounts while suppressing the humane voices with whom he disagrees. He has used X not only to subvert the election for the US presidency, but to create a role for himself in US politics ...

4. .... which, though he has never stood for election and would not be eligible, grants him immense power over the citizens of that nation. X has been used as a tool to help replace democracy with oligarchy. Musk claimed, on purchasing the platform, to be a “free speech absolutist”.

5. He is in fact a prolific censor, suspending dissenting accounts and using lawsuits to shut down free speech, while employing an algorithm to increase the reach of his own posts 1,000-fold. He cannot abide a level playing field.

6. He has permitted or encouraged the growth of a ghost army of bots and trolls to degrade the experience of all who disagree with him. Their task is not just to abuse opponents but, perhaps more importantly, to drown intelligent conversation with a tsunami of stupidity.

7. They respond to data with denial, expertise with execration, insight with insult and thinking with thuggery. They suck the meaning out of everything. The stupidity trends in one direction: in the service of economic power. It is a weapon used to suppress the possibility of a better world.

8. Many years ago, when I lived in Brazil, I learnt that the military dictatorship had actively sought to suppress educational levels in schools, as it saw a well-informed population as a political threat. A confused, distracted and ignorant population is easy to manipulate.

9. Now this counter-educational model is being rolled out worldwide, and Elon Musk is its primary sponsor. I stayed on X long after I first considered leaving, as I believed it was wrong to cede the ground to an oligarch and his minions.

10. But I came to see that those of us who do not subscribe to Musk’s grim project are being used as groundbait: stimulating the feeding frenzy of 15-minute, 24-hour hate that now powers X. Brute force – the unmediated power of money – has beaten humanity, intelligence, humour and democracy.

11. On Bluesky I can be the person I want to be, a better person than I am on X, where it is almost impossible not to get dragged into the mud. I feel I can be understood because I am not confronting a deliberate effort to misunderstand me. So I can speak more quietly.

12. There's no guarantee that Bluesky will not also one day be monetised by its owners or captured by self-serving billionaires. But for now it's a place in which interesting conversations can be had, kindness can be shown to strangers and a better world can be imagined. I hope to see you there.

Just so.  

US plug-in sales slow

 I used to regularly post updates on the US EV market, but stopped in 2019 when my source (Inside EVs) stopped publishing the data because several carmakers started being coy about their EV sales (I wonder why?)

However, I've found a new source, Atlas EV Hub, and so I've been able to update my charts.

This chart is from Atlas EV Hub, but the data are not seasonally adjusted.  The data include plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) and battery electric vehicles (EVs).

The chart below shows the original (= not seasonally adjusted), seasonally adjusted, and smoothed data for EVs and PHEVs combined, drawn on a log scale.

Sales have clearly slowed.  A big chunk of the problem has been the turmoil at Tesla.  Elon Musk has taken his eye off Tesla to focus on his vanity project Twitter (X) and obsessive dotty right-wing memes, and this has happened at a time when the overall US auto market has been slowing, and China has been struggling to get economic growth out of the doldrums.  In the last couple of weeks, he's sacked all the staff working on the Tesla supercharger network, only to say last night that he's going to spend $500 million building it up again!  The people who initially supported Tesla because they wanted to do something about the climate and pollution have been repelled by Musk's lurch to the Right.  But perhaps, as Musk says, Tesla is now an AI company, in which case he's prolly stopped caring about EV sales.  Bad news for the planet.

Chinese carmakers can't fill the gap, because the US has a 25% tariff on Chinese EVs.  Since the Biden Administration plans to quadruple this, EV sales in the US are likely to continue to wobble, while consumers wait to see what happens.  The US's attempt to gain ground in EVs with higher tariffs will no doubt push up EV prices, even after the generous subsidies.   The subsidies won't be available for EVs with Chinese batteries, so CATL's dramatic halving of li-ion battery pack prices (to ~$56/kWh) this year, and its introduction of hugely improved sodium-ion batteries at $40/kWh, won't benefit US consumers.

US EV sales are likely to stagnate over the next couple of years, while we wait for US EV and battery makers get their act together.  

Famous corporate taglines

 by Nick Anderson

Colonisation is good....according to the Right

 From a Xit by Mike Carlton

Colonisation was “the luckiest thing that happened to this country...” John Winston Howard OM AC.

[Howard is a former "Liberal" (so called) Party PM of Australia]