Convert Twitter SF HQ to homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway? - Elon | Hacker News Reader

Convert Twitter SF HQ to homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway? - Elon

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83 pointsahiknsr122 comments

Elon has a wonderful ability to make use of other people to build his own image. I was a former fanboy in the 2010s but he's so far off the deep end I won't consider touching anything he has control over.

It was a disappointing turn from someone who could lead with vision to a billionaire troll that shows signs of what looks like depression to me. He's slowly sliding off the deep end.

In some way he reminds me of John McAffee.

John McAffee was cooler, in the ride or die sort of way, but for taxes.

Every unstable, libertarian-leaning tech founder is really just one tax bill argument away from going McAfee.

Must be all the coke..

I think you can often tell when musk is tweeting while high or not.

We’re in an age that lionizes thinking different, that cherishes frank real comments that border on insanity, that embraces going viral. One person’s deep end is another’s genius. Musk is simply reinventing himself for American culture’s worship of celebrity and maverick contrarianism.

In doing so he’s not only following the footsteps of polarizing figures like the previous president or Kanye West. There’s no shortage of such figures in tech, from pmarca to pg. Becoming a pontificating blowhard is practically a rite of advancement these days. The only difference is the degree of detached-from-reality contrarianism and level of politeness in tone.

All you need is an outsized ego that's easily bruised and you too can be a Twitter legend.

The important next step is to tweet meaningless nonsense. So short that it can't be wrong, but so vague your followers will create their own illusion of your brilliance.

Not meaningless, merely ambiguous. Twitter’s pithy format expedites this bigly. Entire site is one big series of Rorshach tests.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

The film Network (1976) predicted all of this.

The difference is that instead of a TV network exploiting the crazy for profit, the lunatics are now fully in control.

It's truly something that Elon went from calling a rescue diver a "pedo", spreading dangerous covid misinformation, and generally doing everything a normal person would get banned from twitter for to becoming a board member. But I'm not surprised.

I'm not sure Kanye West or Donald Trump would be considered poster-boys of good mental health...

Starlink is pretty good. Allowed me to work remote in an extremely rural location

Yes, Starlink is fantastic. So are the Tesla Powerwalls and their roof. I don't have any of their cars, and I'm not sure the truck will end up being the right match for me though it appears more practical than most competition so far on paper, but friends do and love them so we'll see. Regardless of anything else, one of the things about Elon (or figures like Steve Jobs for that matter) is that there is real serious substance there too at the base of everything. That's a very important distinction to me vs the majority of blowhard figures, and something that a lot of people seem to have trouble dealing with vs throwing everything into the same bucket.

I think Elon's Twitter investment, in capital and his own personal time, is stupid in the basic way that he has genuinely vastly more valuable (by his own words) things to do with both. At the same time the products that his vision, luck, and perhaps some level of madness have helped bring into being have directly improved my own life, the lives of a number of clients, and I believe the world. That's far more than most of us can say. And he didn't have to do it at all. As sibling comment points out, he made a solid fortune before SpaceX and Tesla, and could have done a range of other things that most rich people do. Both new startups were very risky endeavors, and very capital intensive very risky endeavors not just software. The classic kind where someone well off loses everything. A hundred someodd million is in one sense a lot of money, but it's not the money where one can just spend billions as a hobby. Those startups' resounding success shouldn't result in 20/20 hindsight white washing that, he was on the brink a number of times and some pride he feels over it is flat out justified.

So sure it's too bad those same instincts and untempered self-confidence seem to result in self-destructive/counter productive tendencies in some spheres. But he has in fact earned it and it doesn't require any kind of "fanboy" thinking to objectively conclude based on his impact on my life and society that between what he apparently says sometimes on social media vs on the ground hard achievements the balance is tipped firmly towards the latter. I much prefer that to the scary "quiet" "civilized" rich barons who quietly, politely and out of the lime light go about their business of fucking us all over with pollution and corruption.

Thanks for this balanced take. I have quite a dislike for Elon (and alia), but I can sorta agree with your writing.

One small thing though, even though funding startups was risky, I don’t believe it is entirely fair to reward this risk-seeking behavior as it is pure luck in a very significant percentage. Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.

>Thanks for this balanced take. I have quite a dislike for Elon (and alia), but I can sorta agree with your writing.

Thank you as well. I can certainly understand not liking some of his public stream of consciousness stuff. There is a definite impulsive streak there, and a bunch of other stuff that I'm not going to join the list of armchair psychoanalysts in going over but yeah. At the same time though I observe some odd group social effects that happens with regards to him and others like him, a "nails that stick up get hammered down" sort of thing. Comparing amount of press and dislike Musk has gotten in the West over the last decade and change he really entered the public consciousness vs, say, Putin up until a few months ago is enlightening. Or a host of other dictators/wannabes worldwide. Or fossil fuel CEOs and the like at American majors, whom I highly doubt most of the population can even name a single one of. Or CEOs/etc fighting rear guard actions against getting rid of lead or repairing infrastructure or a thousand other key things because it would be against their immediate personal financial interests. The world is full of rich folks who are not merely parasites but monsters, yet have a fraction of the virtual angst spilled over them vs Musk doing some silly thing on twitter. It's worth checking our impulses there I guess, what humans focus a lot on is definitely not always rational. Who irks us in some specific fashion or tugs our strings isn't necessarily the same as who smoothly and slowly slides knives in our collective backs, smiling self-deprecatingly and offering refreshments the whole time.

>One small thing though, even though funding startups was risky, I don’t believe it is entirely fair to reward this risk-seeking behavior as it is pure luck in a very significant percentage. Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.

With apologies, but I don't agree fully with either part of this. First, while luck certainly played a role in Musk's trajectory, serious hard work, intelligence, vision and ability to gather around other even smarter people was critical too. Like much of HN I've been part of a few startups (zero home runs though some cool tech in one case), and doing one is never easy and most fail. Having lots of money to start can make some aspects easier but certainly not remotely a guarantee either as we can see from a stream of unicorn failures. There has to be some "there" there, real substance. And sometimes having lots of money to start can be outright poisonous if it means nobody ever feels any real pressure. For a direct SpaceX corollary consider the case of Blue Origin. Older than SpaceX. Has unlimited backing and has spent billions as well. Literally has never even once gotten something to orbit. Nothing. Not even an engine for somebody else's rocket. Bezos' backing may well in some ways have been a liability, it's allowed BO to act like a lazy unproductive Old Space company despite having zero revenue stream. They haven't needed to do the desperate hustle and focus that SpaceX did. They also didn't have an productively and intimately interested founder/leader. It shows.

Musk was key to making X.com and then the joining with PayPal work. And it can't be said those were just wasting money on something silly either, for all its massive disappointments the online payment thing was a big deal and fully viable as real business. It wasn't just luck. And even if it was, you're still being too blasé in your follow up analogy:

>Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.

If someone won the lottery and then, rather then live on those winnings in luxury, turned around and sunk it all into two enormously capital intensive (orders of magnitude more than their winnings) ventures attempting to completely disrupt THREE entirely different massively entrenched global government/megacorp industries (orbital spaceflight, mechanized land transport, and the whole fossil fuel industry) to the benefit of all humanity with things along the way like creating a new player in the global information network industry that specifically was tuned to serve the most left behind, and then succeeded? Yes we can congratulate said lottery winner at that point right?

So Tesla and SpaceX were in no way "luck in a very significant percentage". There were very fundamental strengths there and huge holes being ignored. There was risk in how it would all come together, but the engineering was very good, Musk was deeply involved in that according to those on the ground floor, and they weren't trying to do something physically impossible at all. The vision and guts to see that through, the risk to go up against established lobbying to do it, even the hustle to get others to buy into it, is all a worthy accomplishment. There isn't any need to put any asterisks next to that just because he also says stupid shit or does silly things as well. Not even dangerously stupid things like his dumb stubborn insistence on doing autonomous driving with just cameras (because 'that's what humans do'). If he died tomorrow he still would have played a major role in seriously changing the world for the better.

I know I am still talking from a very emotional point of view and sure, I will give him that with PayPal he did have a vision, and that he did choose good basis for his money in case of Tesla and spacex. My primary problem with him is his ego — he literally bought the founder title for Tesla when it wasn’t in fact started by him.

But you are right, it is not 100% luck to discover a business opportunity for sure (but it is still more luck than we often attribute to it — there have been studies done on it and successful people often overattribute their cleverness and other skills over sheer dumb luck and being at a good place at a good time)

I still think he has great intuition, better than anyone I am aware of, and his actions have been rooted in first principles. Unfortunately, he deviates from his ideals when he is threatened (justly or unjustly) and we, normal people, get to deal with consequences because he has billions of dollars and thus he matters more than others.

The only “consequences” as I see them with Elon doing what you’ve described is that I’ve had to deal with are people around me kvetching about the dude. Which is a consequence that’s very easy for me to ignore. As easy as it is for me to ignore the dude himself.

I suspect you probably mean more severe “consequences” though.

Would you mind sharing some? Maybe seeing outside my own bubble here will lessen my cynicism

I disagree. He's one of the last reasons I have any optimism at all about the future.

How can you watch this drone video of Giga Berlin and not be impressed and inspired?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-4yOx1CnXE

Or inspired by what SpaceX is accomplishing? None of this would exist if he hadn't invested all his Paypal earnings and time over the past 20 years into them. He could have retired and burned it on a yacht instead.

What exactly is impressive and inspiring about the drone video?

Aside from the nifty drone work, it looks no different from the Toyota and Corvette plants I toured 20+ years ago as a child.

He would have much less money if he would have spent it only on a yacht.

Also, what about leaving space up for NASA, instead of funneling away government funds from it to a private company? How is that even okay?

NASA has always funneled government funds to private companies. Atlas rockets were built by General Dynamics. Apollo lunar landers were built by Grumman. The space shuttles were built by Rockwell and Boeing.

Because NASA is a civilian agency, not military, contracting operations out to commercial companies is the next logical step, just like the government hires commercial air travel, shipping, and ground transportation.

Why should space be left up to NASA? Plus, as the others said, NASA has always contracted private companies for building the hardware. I also don't really see how "funneling away" as a complaint makes any sense, if the government spends money, it's obviously going to eventually be spent on companies to pay for goods and services, unless you advocate a model where the government replicates everything any company might ever do for them. What we should want is for the government to get the most bang-for-buck, which they have been getting increasingly more of from SpaceX.

We've spent much of the past 50 years since Apollo funneling money into aerospace giants like Boeing with very little to show for it in terms of efficiency. When SpaceX entered the launch market, the US was not particularly competitive with the rest of the world for commercial launches, Boeing and Lockheed had a duopoly and had grown fat on government money, with no serious desire to improve their rockets. Even today, we're at $80B+ invested into SLS+Orion to be years late and only capable of launching once per year at nearly $5B per launch.

Meanwhile, SpaceX earned nearly 60% of the commercial launch market on the back of its significantly lower launch prices, has returned US human spaceflight capability for much less cost than the competition (who still haven't delivered), has been responsible for paving the way for all the other 'new space' startups (setting legal precedents and getting entrepreneurs interested) and has allowed NASA to do more on several missions due to much cheaper launch costs, for instance:

- DART did not have to rideshare due to Falcon 9's dedicated launch price being lower than competition's shared price, eliminating the possibility of failure in case the new ion thruster design on it had issues

- Europa Clipper will not have to spend an extra $1B to make its delicate instruments able to handle SLS's rough ride and will not have to budget an additional $2B for an SLS launch

- Saving NASA the ~$4B extra that the less capable, more dangerous but more 'traditional' lunar lander design would've cost to make.

Then add in that due to Soyuz becoming unavailable and pretty much all other western rockets in the same payload class being fully booked and in a transition phase to their next generation, Falcon 9 is saving the US a massive amount of government money that would have otherwise been funneled to companies like Boeing in another 'blank check' type project like SLS.

Even considering future developments, as a direct result of their success with SpaceX, there's a big push from within NASA for future contracts for things like rockets and space stations to be fixed cost and partially commercially funded (with the hope that eventually these will be mostly commercially driven, where NASA only has to pay to be a tenant instead of paying for the entire thing from start to finish), again improving the cost effectiveness of space activity.

> How can you watch this drone video of Giga Berlin and not be impressed and inspired?

Specifically about Gigafactory, I too was awestruck when I watched Tesla's assembly line for the first time. Only later did I learn that's how most of the cars are manufactured now a days.

Volvo assembly line for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T5TKzyv_ds

> It was a disappointing turn from someone who could lead with vision to a billionaire troll that shows signs of what looks like depression to me

Are these mutually exclusive? My model is that he's picked up trolling as a hobby, but I don't understand the impulse to assume that it's changed his job performance.

What job? Owning something is not a job and I assure you it’s not he who comes up with any sort of design.

He's the CEO and Chief Engineer of SpaceX and CEO and Product Architect of Tesla, among other things if I'm not mistaken. Were you under the impression that he's a silent shareholder of the companies he's founded, spending his days sunning himself on his yacht?

All bought titles. His only actual contribution to tesla for example is a single design-related one for the doors.

No, my impression is that he is a very loud shareholder spending his days spewing stupid things on twitter.

This is a joke that Elon wrote while using the bathroom this morning. There's no reason to read too much into this and convert these comments into a philosophy course.

Isn't the joke that he has passive shares, but is able to push a vote through the board without involving them?

He refiled as active.

Taking his full 15% allowance within two years wont be an issue, i expect him to continue pushing.

Unfortunately we're forced into this obnoxious situation where people have to spend a fair amount of time and energy parsing out these "jokes" because they're made by someone with an extreme amount of wealth and power. This, at least, is why I find him exhausting. And despite all of the chatter about his brilliance, this is not good leadership behavior.

No one is forced to analyze his tweets, it's unbelievably easy to just ignore him if you don't like Elon.

Actually, if you work in tech it's kinda tough. Especially when he buys a large stake in a company whose services you consider valuable and then starts bleating out erratic trollish(?) hot takes. I ignore him on Twitter and then they turn up here.

I hear you, but for someone who jokes around, he has a habit of making some of those jokes become a reality. If he writes it down, dare I say, we should not dismiss it as a joke.

What a visionary. This whole gig is just going to be a series of random brainfarts and trolling isn’t it?

Don't forget stock manipulation. That's the centerpiece.

Yeah - as much as I truly love what Elon is doing for the world it's a bit hard to take him serious when he posts that kind of crap. Telling Twitter to turn HQ into a homeless shelter is not much better that saying things like "If Musk just gave every person $1000 blah blah".. those topics are worthy problems that we must solve, but the solution is not for all the tech companies to give up their office space.

He's making a joke. You're not meant to take it seriously

It would land a lot better if the richest man in the world actually bothered to contribute to helping the homeless problem he's lambasting with that "joke".

https://fortune.com/2022/03/22/elon-musk-charity-donations-6...

Ha. Ha.

Hey, let's not normalize deviance. Dude is perpetually on drugs, he thinks that pills are a food group. Fine if you are Joe Random, not OK if you are are an influential businessman.

Elon if you are reading this please change yourself ASAP for HarryHirsch.

Normalizing deviance has been the name of the game for western society for a long time now.

>"First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power."

He's making a joke. You're not meant to take it seriously (2009)

I'm old enough to remember when jokes were funny.

I found it funny.

I’d recommend you find more compassion for homeless people. This joke isn’t funny.

I don’t think the joke is that funny but you can absolutely make a joke of this shape while having compassion for the homeless. If you strip away the context of Elon, it’s a joke poking fun at naive trivial solutions to homelessness, which if anything is mildly pro-homeless-people.

oh! Must've been tired haha :) .. sometimes you just don't know with this dude!!

It can be difficult to tell some times since he mixes in the jokes with the serious suggestions. And his serious suggestions are sometimes pretty out there themselves.

TBH (In bad taste or not) I kinda read this exactly as poking fun at those “give every person $1000” tweets.

The richest man in the world making a "joke" at the expensive of the absolute least fortunate in America is not a good look. Pretty tone deaf if you ask me.

I’m not saying it was in good taste but he’s not intending it to be at the expense of the homeless, it’s at the expense of the “just give everyone $1000” people (who are much more fortunate than the homeless but still less fortunate than Elon).

Edit: to be explicit, the joke as I read it is that losing twitter HQ would be bad for twitter employees and also be a (borderline comically) ineffective solution to the homelessness problem.

This has nothing to do with homeless.

Elon is saying the staff could be replaced by the homeless and it would be a better use of the office and money.

This is about putting the staff on notice a house cleaning is coming.

Twitter is permanent work from home. He's making a joke about the office being empty and the streets outside the office being filled with homeless people.

This tweet where he calls out needing to fire 12 floors of staff might suggest otherwise;

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512974273606045702

Finally an interesting comment, thank you. Seeing how blatantly detectable a lot of shitcoin spam on the platform is, one does wonder where the staff are spending their time. Even if it’s hard to algorithmically detect a spam, it should not be so clunky to report it when the spammer repeats the same thing 20 times. It’s like they learned their work ethic at Google or something.

> Seeing how blatantly detectable a lot of shitcoin spam on the platform is

I'm a nocoin/nevercoin blockchain skeptic who hates shitcoin spam too, but I wonder: does people posting tweets about "shitcoins" violate Twitter's usage policy, or just offend your sensibilities? I could see how posting the same thing twenty times might violate a policy, though not sure if it violates Twitter's. I only post about infosec and politics on Twitter and some users might not like that either!

You seem to be mixing different things.

They do have an anti spam policy.

I was talking specifically about spam. Non-spam is another matter.

And who decides what is and is not spam, you might ask? Well Twitter of course; they just aren’t very good at detecting even blatant examples of it proactively enough to prevent it from detracting from the user experience.

I saw it as a sign that he's not a fan of WFH/remote arrangements for tech companies, though at its root it's a shitpost.

That's still a pretty shitty comment, or joke, or whatever, to publicly make. Imagine if you were a Twitter employee and this is how you're finding out that he plans to come for a large swath of you? By cracking wise and half-jokingly putting the decision over whether or not you get to keep your job in the hands of that poll?

I don't care if we all could've assumed he was going to want to clean house, he could at least have some tact in how he goes about it.

I think you're reading into this, you're making inferences that simply have no context or support. As others have pointed out, it's likely a satirical comment about under-utilization of the office space (that's also quite expensive).

That said, it could be good for Twitter to go on a diet. It's spending a lot on employing some 5.5k people [1] and it doesn't seem to be in a massive growth phase [2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/303681/twitter-users-wor...

One of the world's richest men using the homeless as a punchline.

10 years ago I was homeless and broke, please don't take offence on my behalf.

In the same way you shouldn’t claim to speak for all homeless.

When did they claim that?

You must be fun at parties.

The homeless aren't the punchline. The punchline is all of the Twitter employees who lobbied for permanent work from home and thus no longer need that large empty building.

I guess I'm curious to hear the downside to converting Twitter HQ to something useful like housing for the homeless. Twitter is a very progressive company, I would hope their employees would see the value in a move like this. The fact that this tweet has ruffled their feathers says a lot more about them, than Musk.

Not sure how I would feel as a Twitter employee right now. Especially if I didn’t like Elon.

If you’re a Twitter employee who doesn’t like Elon, he probably wants you to feel like quitting.

That's kinda counter-productive in a world where all the techie companies are vying for top talent.

The big issues with tech aren’t finding enough people who can iterate a linked list efficiently. The big issues are cultural and political. You can call it a need for political equality if you want it to fit into a liberal framework.

They can quit if they don’t like him.

And bonus, if they can't find new work Elon's got them covered with sweet new diggs.

Optimistic if you're one of the productive employees, particularly if you still believe in free speech.

You dropped your /s. You can use this one.

Someone suggested to think of him as a genius 15 year old and I can't unsee it.

The man is clearly making a joke at the expense of liberal Bay Area tech workers, and you all are in here clutching your pearls and psychoanalyzing him. Lmao.

He’s a great troll, as demonstrated by the reactions here. Why do people get so bent out of shape about tweets? I’ll never understand it.

They are very fragile. I’m here to join the other grey comments in laughing at them.

Yea this whole thing is hilarious. A lot of folks on here without a ounce of humor in them.

I think what he's doing is trying to use the internet like people interact in real life. Online we all have these overly straight forward and sterile personas, for the most part, because people get so weird and autistic about jokes or off-color references, like my last choice of adjective. It's not serious and not reflective of my views, but also has enough of a tinge of truth in it to convey some meaning - like all of the Elon's current slew of shitposts.

And I think the reason "people" get bent out of shape about tweets was answered pretty aptly by this [1] post which is also why I put "people" in quotes. 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter, with a bias towards youth and liberalism. And of those 22%, 80% of all posts are generated by 10% of them with what is almost certainly a further bias.

So when you think of "people" on Twitter you're talking about a biased to heavily biased sample of 2.2% of America. It's about as representative of America as Atherton is. So the reason people get bent out of shape about posts on Twitter is because Twitter is a little micro-bubble of society where the people engulfed within it likely have a very different perspective of reality than people outside of it.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838517

I’m pretty jacked into Twitter, but there’s still a higher order bit that seems to be related to people reacting to things like this with broad, sweeping outrage. A lot of people on Twitter either just roll their eyes or think this is funny at least in terms of meta trolling skill. I think a lot of people are very unwell.

Me neither. I think he’s politically similar to his critics, but he doesn’t identify with their tribe which appears to be unforgivable. I don’t think in our current political system it matters what you support, but rather who you side with.

Tweets are speech. They're not some special category of thing separate from human communication. "Person said something inflammatory and people are inflamed" is just how human communication works.

What the comment is remarking on is why so many adults let obvious trolling affect their mental state so deeply. Independently of judging the troll for his behavior, it's reasonable to wonder at people's fragility, particularly in the face of such light trolling.

This is also why the specific form of speech (tweets) are relevant. Letting your guard down in front of friends/family/colleagues is completely normal, and people would naturally be more vulnerable to inflammatory comments in this context.

But Twitter is not any of those contexts: there are a functionally infinite amount of people saying every manner of dumb or otherwise inflammatory things, which means the only leverage you have is over your own reactions.

It's just such a self-own: "I'm going to let my mental health be temporarily controlled by any of the millions of people choosing to be cheeky or trollish at any given moment". I share GP's bafflement.

I've noticed it's gotten very common recently for wingnuts on both sides to pick an Emmanuel Goldstein figure that represents the root of all seemingly-unrelated evil in the world. Elon has become that figure for a big chunk of those people, a fever-dream boogeyman to rival George Soros or Hillary Clinton.

As far as I can tell, a sane person's reaction to him is some weighted combination of a) bemusement at his trolling, b) annoyance at some of his actually-irresponsible behavior, and c) respect for his accomplishments.

Yeah I'm surprised people here are treating this so seriously. Not much to see here, the joke is pretty mild. Seems like people are having a hard time accepting his new Twitter role? I guess I might too if I didn't think Twitter was such a hopeless cesspool.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513045405029711878

He's also suggesting that they rename Twitter to "Titter"

He blends serious with not serious. He can test ideas and write them off as jokes if he faces a backlash. It's a somewhat interesting strategy.

I can’t think of a twitter feed that deserves attention on HN less.

I can’t imagine the chaos among product org caused by Elon’s recent Tweeets. It’ll have thrown their planning completely off gear.

Housing first has failed SF. The homeless would just trash the place. Don’t get sucked down into this mire Elon.

Well, that was $3 billion well spent.

Actually this is not a bad idea, but the required conversion might be a bit expensive. A better idea IMO would be to convert the first floor to an open-access showering / bathing / clothes washing / personal storage setup with attendants to cut down on people trying to use it as a heroin shooting gallery. Maybe put in a free veterinary clinic for those with homeless pets, hey maybe even a free medical clinic for humans too. Trying to set it up for people to sleep and live there, though, that would be a bit much.

Why not have a monitored space to inject drugs right next to the OD meds and counseling services to get people off of drugs?

And a monitored space to drink cheap vodka too? Personally I'd say no, you have to go shoot up and guzzle cheap alcohol somewhere else. Fact is more homeless people have alcohol issues than opiate issues, anyway. A lot of the alcoholics and opiate addicts don't even want to get clean, so why bother catering to them like that? Give services to people who actually want to get off the street first, that's the better option.

We’re giving people those spaces in Europe and it’s a massive improvement for both city people and the addicted. Please open your mind.

Yes, but Europe has socialized medicine for all. Here in the USA we have no such generalized resources, so triage is necessary. There's a certain fraction of the homeless population that simply needs a period of institutionalization in a managed care facility, and why should the much larger fraction of the homeless population that simply needs basic resources to get off the street be forced to mix in with the crazies shooting up in broad daylight?

One of the most forward-thinking prescient cultural predictions of the modern era just keeps becoming more and more true:

What we have is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center. What we're seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved. Tomorrow's Lee Atwater will work through sock puppets on IRC. Tomorrow's Sister Souljah will get shouted down with rape threats. Tomorrow's Tipper Gore will make an inexplicably popular YouTube video. Tomorrow's Willie Horton ad will be an image macro, tomorrow's Borking a doxing, tomorrow's Moral Majority a loose coalition of DoSers and robo-petitioners and scat-GIF trolls—all of them working feverishly in service of the old idea that nothing should ever really change.

https://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-...

This is just trolling. He doesn’t have any control over twitter, he’s just a regular shareholder. Sure he could maybe try and get on the board if he wanted to but the other major shareholders would have to be pretty dumb to allow that the way he’s behaving.

He is on the board. :p

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that Mr. Musk, 50, would be appointed to its 11-person board in a term that expires in 2024.*

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/business/twitter-elon-mus...

I can’t keep up. I guess the other shareholders are pretty dumb. It's pretty clear he's motivated by some ideological crusade, rather than increasing profits.

It would require a careful voting power analysis, but his level of share ownership may already make him the defacto owner of twitter. Certainly he isn't that far from it already and could get there if he wanted to.

The rules are that you can either be influential or a troll. We just don’t have any way to deal with influential trolls.

Trolling can be extremely influential if the target holds some logically inconsistent view (which describes much of the urban California politics.)

What I mean is: what keeps our world from completey collapsing is that 99% of trolls are trolls because they lack influence and take out their frustration on the internet as trolls. Whether those people have consistent views or not doesn't really matter, the trolling part is they don't allow a discussion they just lob in a grenade into the discourse and watch it burn.

When someone does that with 100M twitter followers, it has consequences.

Meh. People with 100M twitter followers have garbage opinions all the time. Some trolling would probably have the consequence of people learning not to believe everything they read on Twitter.

The homeless problem was exacerbated by twitter employees being upset about the outdoor toilets near their office.

The homeless problem was exacerbated by a housing shortage, not by people thinking that there should be a better solution to people's problems than sewage in the streets. SF spends a ton of money keeping people out of homelessness through rent assistance, and this is some of the most effective public money that can be spent to help with the problem. But even more effective would be to stop the ever rising costs by allowing more people to live in the city, and allowing them to spend their own money to construct this new housing. High homelessness rates are not caused by drugs, or by mental illness. High homelessness rates are caused by artificially constrained housing and the ever increasing prices that this sort of market creates.

I fear that by embracing the status quo, refusing to allow homeless shelters, refusal to allow housing for anyone, really, that there will be a growing anti-homeless backlash. Otherwise normal people are upset that there is no solution year after year to the displacement and misery. People are becoming tired of pols claiming that they care, claiming that they will do something, only to have those same pols reject the obvious solutions to reduce homelessness. I seriously fear for the increased human toll that will result from continued inaction housing.

I think using unused office space is an exceptional idea. This will never happen at Twitter’s headquarters, but, Elon has a wonderful way of making everyone think about things differently. massively wealthy companies in Silicon Valley, yet a crisis of homelessness.

Hasn’t there been a whole slew of companies that attempted to do this before; realising that office space doesn’t convert very well…

No one had ever considered the juxtaposition of homelessness and wealth in San Francisco until Elon came along. The scales have fallen from our eyes. Huzzah. Excelsior!

> No one had ever considered the juxtaposition of homelessness and wealth in San Francisco until Elon came along.

Yet few of these people have ever considered doing anything about it?

Cities around the world did something similar (and didn't just trolled) during the pandemic. A lot of people had the same idea while seeing all these empty buildings.

https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/07/15/downtown-hotel-tu...

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-requisi...

https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/dartmouth-hotel-to-be-converted-...

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/10/12/toronto-has-2500...

Wow a lot of unhappy silicon valley folks downvoting. Still haven’t heard a good reason why this proposal is bad?

It’s becoming clear this is a man who got lucky too early and missed out on the maturing influences and experiences most people face.

Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, here's more supporting evidence, I guess: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513045405029711878

I think a fair number of people retain a sense of humor into adulthood but most lose the courage to be even the slightest bit subversive.

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