Elon is still butthurt about Christopher Nolan casting a Those People in his movie and is claiming that Grok will make a “historically accurate” Odyssey movie.
We want to make sure we get all the facts straight about the actual real guy who blinded a cyclops, fought a sea monster, ate his own crew after they turned into animals, and sailed into Hell.
I have a feeling that should it be made (a dubious prospect in itself), it will make Melania look like a blockbuster.
Will almost certainly be better than that, it has an interesting protagonist and story line.
Someone on BlueSky pointed out that the ships wheel seen in that clip wasn’t invented until several centuries later.
Continuing the mini-hijack about musk’s grandiose plans to Rule ze Vorld!
Starlink has been very popular with business jets. Equipment is small and not too draggy, lots of bandwidth for the honchos to play games or watch porn on, worldwide coverage. What’s not to like?
Well, Starlink just doubled the price. Because they can. And also switched from a model of global service to regional service. But you can only have one region. So a jet that only operates in the USA will pay twice as much per month and has been switched from global to US-only coverage. Want to go to e.g. the Caribbean for a few days? Gotta switch regions for a fee. There is no dual- or multi-region option. Or you can buy global coverage which is now 10x as much as it was.
Obviously all this is simply a way to cause most operators to switch to global coverage. Same exact product now for 10x the price.
The equipment alone costs $300K to install & takes the jet out of service for a weekish. So once you’ve got it, the cost to switch to any competitive service gets steep quick. If there is a competitive service.
Welcome back to robber baron monopoly capitalism.
Here’s an article that may still be free, or may now be paywalled:
SpaceX Doubles Starlink Service Prices For Bizav | Aviation Week
And the wake is massive for a ship that small and slow, and it’s backwards. Unless they are rowing very hard against the wind with their sails unfurled.
Hey, he said historically accurate, not physically accurate.
That’s a good observation. However, looking at the still image, it’s not clear that this is part of a ship’s wheel – it’s probably a steering oar. If so, however, that’s wrong, too. Steering oars, called “steerboards”, were on the right-hand side of the ship because most men were right-handed, which is how that side of the ship came to be called “starboard”. Which is also why the opposite side, suitable for docking because it lacked a steerboard, came to be called “port”.
Starboard and Larboard respectively and like most nautical terms. you swallow most of the vowels.
The people-end of steering oars are hefty things. There being little mechanical advantage you sometimes have to put your whole weight into moving it. That pansy-little hand grip wouldn’t do.
Especially when your ship is on pavement.
A most complex surface to navigate
I dunno. Since you’re not going anywhere navigation should be a snap.
The navigator in such a ship would find himself in the same level as an ashtray in a motorcycle.
If the railroads are any analogy, once the pioneering heyday of establishing the transport network is over and done with and the business settles down into being a “dumb pipe”, government will step in and heavily regulate the whole thing. Never forget that even the richest and most meglomanical tycoon is a mere grasping wannabe compared to even the smallest and weakest sovereign government.
(From the link)
The space company notified Starlink subscribers in early July that its Business Jet 20GB plan, currently priced at $2,000 per month, will transition to an Aviation Regional 25GB plan at $4,000 per month. The new plan allows 25 GB of data use monthly with speeds up to 250 Mbps within one continental region. Additional data will cost $250 per GB.
In the past 30 days I’ve used 86.5 GB on my phone, and that counts as a pretty quiet month. 20 or 25 GB a month is really, really, really restrictive in what you can do without going over. At those rates my bill for this month would be $19,375.
All true.
In a country which is doctrinally able to swallow the idea of regulation for the public good. And in a country where enough of the political class are not merely the paid lackeys of the tycoons.
We know which one the USA was in the mid 1800s. Even then there was a fight lasting multiple decades to build up a populist groundswell with the muckrakers and the trustbusters and … until eventually the public supported reining in the tycoons.
But we don’t know about how the 2030s will go.
Put another way, at 250 megabits per second, a 25 gigabyte monthly allocation would be used up in 13 minutes.
This ignores a rather large part of history, which was the role of the federal government in giving the private railroad companies that oligopolistic power in the first place through land grants.
The government didn’t “step in”. They were already deeply involved, essentially subsidizing the business and the robber barons in the first place, who wouldn’t have been able to build that power without sovereign government rigging things in their favor. They weren’t job creators. They didn’t build their companies on their own. The idea they were entirely some sort of self-made men is an American myth, one that persists to this day.
So, come to think of it, the more things change…
Musk said, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
Others have already pointed out the folly of claiming historical accuracy for a made-up story involving gods and monsters, so I’d like to point out that he has a history of grandiose promises like this (e.g., full self driving next year, landing people on Mars next year, etc. etc. etc.) that never pan out. And yet some still seem to swallow his lies.
It’s tough to be a white supremacist, given that a multitude of facts contradict your entire belief system. The longing for an All-Father who will solve that problem leads people to cultish thinking, accepting lies in exchange for the fantasy-construct.
And the fantasy-construct of Elon Musk as a savior requires a lot of self-delusion.