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Yeah that’s true. The headline is asserting something that I don’t think Musk has actually said he will do. On the other hand, I’m having trouble thinking of any random idea Musk has had that he didn’t attempt to follow through on.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk.

I don’t know why your comment was downvoted when I got to it. It’s a perfectly valid question. To claim in incomprehensible being wouldn’t do any given thing is just as objectively baseless as claiming that they would do that thing.

I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I have never liked the Cybertruck. It looked ridiculous when it came out and there were various online articles that agreed with this at the time. Though I will grant you that there were also a lot of people on the Elon bandwagon who thought it was awesome. One of my best friends actually put down the deposit for one and he and I had a lively debate about it. It was a controversial thing from day 1. And looking back now, this might have been my first clue that Elon was headed off the deep end.

Right, although this idea is somewhat challenged by the story of Sigurðr who is by all accounts the best, bravest, and most famous of all Norse heroes with exploits that include slaying a dragon and receiving personal assistance from Odin on multiple occasions. Sigurðr Is stabbed by his brother-in-law and is able to actually cut the guy in half before dying himself but is then attested as going to Hel in various ways but never to Valhǫll.

It’s unclear why this is and I haven’t seen much discussion about it in scholarly discourse. There is, of course, lots of discussion about what Hel really is/means. But it may have been something implicit in the story that the ancient Norse would have inferred as being obvious. For example, maybe he lost favor with Odin by rescuing the Valkyrie Sigrdrífa from the sleep curse that Odin had placed upon her.

This sort of an idea shows up in Sonatorrek, ostensibly written by Egill Skalagrimsson. In that poem, Egill is lamenting the loss of his son who drowned in a boating accident. In that context, Egill talks about this tragedy in terms of Odin having broken off friendship with him. As a result, Egill has decided to cease sacrificing to Odin, and the consequence is that he now has a vision of Hel standing on the headland waiting for him.

I should actually read/watch that one of these days.

Nah this was a deliberately comedic scene in Gautreks Saga where members of a family keep sacrificing themselves for absurd reasons. There is some possibility that something like this could have happened in some parts of Norse society but there’s no evidence it was a requirement for entry into Valhalla (Old Norse Valhǫll).

In fact, whereas the Prose Edda (a 13th-century narrative guide to understanding skaldic poetry) does claim that those who fall in battle end up in Valhǫll, and this is supported by evidence from pre-Christian poems such as Grímnismál, Norse mythological sources are actually littered with attestations of people dying in combat but not going to Valhǫll, as well as people dying outside of combat but still ending up in Valhǫll.

One example of this is the character Sinfjǫtli from Vǫlsunga Saga. Sinfjǫtli is poisoned by his mother-in-law at a party, and his father Sigmundr carries his dead body down to the shore where a ferryman offers to take it across the water. Once the body is on the boat, it turns out the ferryman is Odin and he disappears with the body which is elsewhere confirmed to have ended up in Valhǫll in the poem Eiríksmál.

Scholar Jens Peter Schjødt theorized in Pre-Christian Religions of the North that entry into Valhǫll is predicated on a person being dedicated to Odin, which is something a person could do for themselves ritualistically (there are references to marking oneself with a spear for Odin) or could also be done to you by an enemy who has set out to kill you and intends to “give” you to Odin as a way of showing his own dedication.

she probably just made it all up

Or stole it from the weeping angels on Doctor Who

Maybe not, but they are the one who keeps leaving me alone in their office for 15 minutes at a time to “go ask their manager” if our negotiations are ok and they are the one who pretends to settle on a price with me and then tries to hard-sell me on all sorts of useless addons. And at they end of the day they are the one that turns making a purchase into a 4-hour process.

Maybe if the alternative to building a horse barn in 1910 was building a garage that was so expensive only like 5% of the population could afford it.

the one that invented the language

frontier people who like to simplify pronunciations

Not only does this display a remarkable lack of awareness for how language works, but also fails to take into account the numerous varieties of British English that specifically avoid the “th” sound (“Whatchu fink, bruv?”). On the other hand, Mainstream American English does not.

⊥

I think fundamentally most people would agree with that. The problem with communism though is that it’s not just a staple of the USSR. There is something on the order of 48 countries that have experienced state-sponsored communism in relatively recent times and it has never once succeeded in achieving these goals but tends to exacerbate poverty, class division, and government oppression of human rights, if not resulting in completely failed states.

Some will read this and assume I am advocating for capitalism. I am not. Asserting problems with communism does not imply capitalism is perfect or even good. But if we do choose to abandon capitalism, the wrong decision is to move to a system with a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals over dozens of historical attempts. As the meme suggests, many Eastern Europeans are old enough to have personal experience with those failures.

Where communism can work well is on a smaller, voluntary scale. When people choose to get together and establish their own rules for pooling resources, small communities can sometimes live quite satisfactorily this way. But no, if we are willing to call capitalism a failure based on its history we have to be honest enough to say the same thing about state-sponsored communism.

He also played John Rolfe in “The New World”, meaning he’s also been a boatman.

Yeah I was barely old enough to be called an adult at the time. Didn’t know much. But knew I wasn’t gonna stay there.

Once upon a time I got a job working at a swimming pool supply store. For a total of about 15 min during my very first shift I was in the main room putting price stickers on things and whatnot. For the remaining hours of my shift I was back in the chlorine room filling up chlorine tanks. Tbf the pool store was following regulations as far as I know. I had goggles and gloves and the room had a big ventilation fan and all that. But even still, I got chlorine all over my skin and clothes and was perpetually dehydrated from the fumes. Had to run to the water fountain like a million times. Afterwards I decided there was no way I was going to work with chlorine all day every day until it killed me so the next day I came in and asked the manager if there was any way I could do other work and not be in the chlorine room. He was like, “unfortunately that’s the job”. So I told him, “ok I understand. In that case I don’t think this is going to work out. Thanks for the opportunity though!” And I left after only one shift. Shortest job I ever had.

I think it’s one of those “probably close enough to random” type things. I found this: https://quantumbase.com/sse/lottery/

I think that’s only true if the lottery numbers you end up with are truly the result of random selection in infinite universes.

Ok, that makes sense. I would agree that for any truly random circumstance, when given infinite iterations, all possible combinations will eventually occur.