This will be an unusual challenge for you. I’m intrigued which angle you’ll try to guess my age from.

I learned it from ancient Orkney technology called “sauna”. 😉

What it does is trigger your parasympathetic nervous system (or maybe the sympathetic, I always lose track of which does what). And yes, that makes blood vessels constrict and dilate and I just find that it enervates me and makes me feel really good.

I’ll try taking a shot after such a shower and report back. 🤣

I have a shower as warm as I can to open all my pores and clean them out.

Then I slam the water all the way to the coldest possible and force myself to stay under it for two minutes.

That’s a huge wake-up call.

There are several problems with this report.

The Line Doesn’t Go Up

As others have pointed out, this implies that Tesla (and to a significantly lesser extent his other enterprises) continues its valuation increase at the current rate. This is not going to happen. Indeed looking just at this graph should show that this is unlikely:

The 2024-09-16 close isn’t even the highest of the past 52 weeks, not to mention the highest of all time (which is c. 2021-11-05). (It isn’t even the highest close of the past 30 days—or of even the past 5 days!) It is, in fact, 55-56% of the all-time high, and that was almost three years ago.

And the pattern of its financials will prevent that line from going up:

See, most investors invest not because they’re cult members (like the fanboi day traders Apartheid Manchild grifts so well) but because they expect to see ROI. And the fundamentals of Tesla are not showing ROI potential.

So the line isn’t pointing up.

Stock Valuation Is Fantasy

And on top of this, this is all “paper wealth”. All of the Manchild’s stocks and five bucks buys you a small coffee at Starbucks. To actually buy more than that small coffee at Starbucks (ideally without an extra five bucks handed to him) the Manchild would have to cash in those stocks. And when he starts selling stock, the stock value will drop. The more he sells, the faster it will drop. That stock bonanza he has is not cash and its valuation is purest fantasy. It’s points for score-keeping, not something you can actually spend.

Basically the only thing you can spend are “liquid assets” and most of Apartheid Manchild’s assets are not liquid (which is why he had to borrow to buy Xhitter). Attempting to liquidate them will drop their value like a concussed bee.

Apartheid Manchild is a Moron

Apartheid Manchild is not the Tony Stark of Real Life like he seems to think he is. He is a guy who started rich and fell upwards. His most valuable company is not one he founded. It’s one he paid for the right to be called the founder of. He didn’t invent electric cars. He didn’t invent reusable rockets. He didn’t invent much of anything, in fact. He has 29 patents to his name. Compare and contrast with James Dyson¹ and his almost 550 patents. The most cited of his patents (with 202 citations) would be #10 on Dyson’s list of influential patents. How about a more recognizable name: Sergey Brin at 141 patents.

And when you look at Apartheid Manchild’s actual patents, the 9 that are actually currently active (9 have expired, and 10 are pending) are singularly unimpressive for such a “world class genius”. Again Dyson will eat his lunch for sheer volume of practical patents, as will Brin (who himself looks like a playing toddler next to Dyson).

Yet if you listen to the Manchild, he is the leading expert on everything that Trump isn’t the leading expert on. He’s the leading expert on logistics (says the man who has chronic supply problems). On manufacturing (says the man whose cars frequently have major quality issues). On electric cars (says the man whose cars are beginning to look positively quaint next to the competition’s). On robotics. On AI. On rockets. On …

And he’s not an expert in anything. Except falling upward in a system whose feedback loops guarantee that once you crack a certain level of cash you fall upward.

This is unsustainable, and once it stops sustaining, his net worth will fall like so many wealthy idiots before him. The higher he sails on the crack of his quisling’s praise, the harder and faster his inevitable fall will be.

Apartheid Manchild is His Own Worst Enemy

As a special case of being a moron, a few years back Apartheid Manchild was something that you could kind of find adorable if you had a certain personality type. He seemed like the bumbling nerd made good. Further his fiction of the self-made billionaire tackling the Big Names with gumption and talent is the kind of stuff the American (Opium) Dream is made of. If he’d kept his mouth shut and kept himself out of the spotlight he might not be in the pickle he’s found himself in now.

But he has too large an ego for that, and a serious grudge against the world to nurse.

So instead he mouthed off on Twitter. Then he trapped himself into having to buy Twitter for waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much. Then he turned Twitter into an echo chamber to amplify his real personality.

And his real personality is repugnant to most people.

He is damaging the Tesla brand. He is damaging the SpaceX brand despite the herculean efforts of Shotwell and co. He has a long string of business failures behind him that are making people think he isn’t the genius he claims to be. And all of this is going to negatively impact his wealth.

So he won’t ever be a trillionaire.

¹ Who? Exactly my point.

That’s the one!

I found an '80s show that I somehow completely missed: “Sledge Hammer!” I don’t know how I missed this show, but I’ve binged it now.

A bit of Korean and Chinese punk. A smattering of Chinese grunge. Some Malaysian Buddhist music. Some Taiwanese Buddhist death metal (no, really!).

No. Hot dogs are repulsive.

… how is a free service supposed to be sustained?

That seems to me to be a powerful argument against “free” services. Because there’s no such thing. Not even:

Free only works if it’s offline/self-hosted and open source IMO.

“Self-hosted” isn’t free. You have to pay for the hosting site one way or another, even if it’s on your property. (Those bandwidth fees? That’s payment.)

I’ll bring an example of a subscription service that still hasn’t enshittified: Mullvad VPN. It’s still a fiver a month and you can’t pay extra for extra functionality. It just always costs the same.

What are the trade-offs associated with it? It was made in 2009. Fifteen years later it hasn’t changed its prices, even as everything around it (including its network fees) has increased? Colour me a little … dubious.

Have you considered, then, the possibility that you should be on something?

Today. I rolled a beer can on the first try onto the highest-payback patch on a mat. I won a six-pack.

OK, not really impressive, but I did surprise a few people around me who never landed on any payback patches after three tries each.

Subscription models are the thin end of the wedge of enshittification.

This you know: the years travel fast, and time after time I done the tell. But this ain’t onebody’s tell. It’s the tell of us all, and you’ve got to listen it and to 'member, 'cause what you hears today you got to tell the newborn tomorrow. I’s looking behind us now into history back.

Imagine a world of television. No streaming, mind. Broadcast television. You had to orient your day around what you wanted to watch, if it was even possible. Or you had to buy expensive equipment to use terrible UIs to try and make an inferior copy of what you wanted to watch at a given time.

We weren’t animals of course. We had this spiffy thing called “cable”. With a cable package you could get a dozen channels clearly instead of maybe two clear ones and a half-dozen more fuzzy ones via the antennae. Life was great! But … it was about to get better. Because the cable companies had cooked up…

PREMIUM CABLE!

And the centrepiece of premium cable was specialty channels, the most popular of which were the movie ones! Just think! You could get movies in their entirety, not hacked and slashed for television audiences. Not torn apart limb from limb by commercial inserts. You’d watch a movie from beginning to end, non-stop, and could do this 24 hours a day, if you liked, all for the price of seeing two movies in theatres per month. (And back then theatres were dirt cheap by comparison to today!)

O frabjous joy!

No commercials. You paid a subscription for these channels, so no commercials.

And then the commercials started.

It started off sanely enough. A scattering of “hand-selected” commercials between movies/episodes/whatever. (And, weirdly, despite the cable companies having opened a new stream of revenue, prices edged up a bit for the premium channels.) Then it was 10-15 minutes of solid commercials between movies/episodes/whatever and they didn’t seem too discriminating in what they advertised. Almost as if it was “anybody who paid” instead of “hand-selected”.

Then, in the more traditionally TV-oriented fare, with episodes, rather than full movies. the specialty channels started putting commercials during the episodes.

Salami tactics. Slice by slice. Prices edged up. Services got worse. And ads infested everything. Until today you can’t even check out what’s showing without being flooded with ads.

Subscription models are not a bulwark against ads.

Same here. I’ve rolled back hard on most software. I use only the stuff I need for work, plus my web browser at home (and even that I carefully choose which web sites I go to because web software is terrible) plus a small handful of apps on my phone (document readers and a shopping app, mainly). Where most people do, say, solo RP with “wikis” and “structured editors” and whatnot, I patiently write with a fountain pen in a physical book.

And ever since I started this detechification of my life, I’ve found that I enjoy my life more. There just seems to be something in me that is in intrinsic opposition to computers.

Nah, it’s been reliability at the core of my distaste for it. Since the '80s.

My life could in general be improved by the removal of software, not by the addition of more.

I’ve seen people doing it with the vertical brush. They have to meticulously move one character at a time, but for calligraphy this is normal anyway.

I’ll see what I can find.

(And yes, brush pens are awesome.)

Is there no such thing as “General Delivery” any longer?

I gave a muskrat pelt that I smuggled into China from Canada to my personal trainer last week.

A friend helps you move. A true friend helps you move the body.

I’m not sure where that data point fits in your model.