So I've had Bluesky for a couple of days. Some observations (and I'm going to use an actual list. If Mastodon doesn't render it, complain to Gargron)...

• There is a significant overlap between there and here in terms of users
• Of the non overlapping parts, we think they're all weird crypto nerds and they think we're all weird tech nerds
• I haven't actually seen any crypto nerds there
• You get followed by random people all the time
• They think we have sticks up our arses to the extent that "you aren't allowed to say anything on Mastodon(SIC); it's like if social media had an HOA"
• They think we have no sense of humour
• Their perception of us is, I think, inaccurate
• Our perception of them is, I think, inaccurate
• It feels a lot like Twitter
• If their perception of us was accurate, I would have a hundred angry replies to this because I said, "Twitter", and haven't content warned anything.
• They're living in a kind of antebellum age of innocence there, and it's not clear how they're going to manage when the worst people in the world turn up

Anyway, it's going to be interesting, for sure.

And like I said, if this looks like arse on Mastodon, complain to Gargron

Record profits for large companies and retailers. Even young adults in well paid jobs can’t afford a home. Increasingly it’s not possible to actually buy anything to own anymore; you have to rent it, even if it’s the ability of your car stereo to play music.

Rampant profiteering, presented as “inflation” (bullshit), and governments respond with tax cuts on VAT which help in the short term, but serve to concentrate even more of the wealth of humanity in the hands of a few by funnelling it upwards.

What we are living through is a concerted attempt by a few thousand people to turn the entire fucking planet into a company store.

Hell, I’m pretty bloody bougie and I feel like these bastards are fighting class war against me. It’s like, if your individual worth is less than 10 figures, then you are going to be slowly stripped of it along with everyone else, in this grace new world of the Musks and the Thiels and the ones whose names we don’t know.

A reckoning is coming, one way or another. I can’t see how it wouldn’t be.

So Musk is a charlatan and a bullshit merchant, and often does not know what he's talking about, as well as a threat to democracy.

However, the number of people gleefully proclaiming this and then proceeding to write utter uniformed bollocks themselves about the Starship/Super Heavy test flight is ... aggravating. I find hypocrisy annoying.

In particular, the " People said he knew what he was doing with rockets, but look at that, lol!" take.

The reality is that SpaceX does know what it is doing. Do not confuse production launch services, their bread and butter, in which they are literally more capable than the entire rest of the planet put together, with a research and development facility blowing up test flight articles.

I get it, it's funny ti laugh at the arsehole because his rocket blew up and his launch pad got destroyed, but the idea that building stuff deliberately to test to destruction is somehow bad engineering practice is simply wrong. We've done it before with spaceflight (there was far more of it during the race to the moon than most people realise), we deliberately crash cars to see how they survive in accidents, we deliberately crash trains, we deliberately fire chickens into jet engines, we deliberately crash planes, we deliberately sink boats, and so on and so on and so on.

Sometimes the only way to get good data about how and when stuff fails is to destroy it and see what happens.