say what you want about elon musk but you gotta admit it’s extremely funny that the rescue team got those boys out before elon could even finish masturbating all over his shitty little escape pod
like he was hemming and hawing over what kind of music to load it with and the thai rescue teams just. got the job done normally. without him. he contributed jack shit and his shitty little submarine was rendered useless by completely standard scuba gear and a few determined workers.
dude tried playing the white savior just got blown the fuck out by people who actually cared about what was going on
hey wanna hear something even funnier, imo?
one of the key pieces of tech in the rescue was the heyphone, a 20-year-old caving radio used by the British diving team who made first contact with the boys.
If you look into the heyphone, you’ll find out that it’s 1. ancient by tech standards, 2. initially designed/assembled by a team of dedicated volunteers from the British Cave Rescue Council and 3. easy to make and fix on your own because the creators (who really wanted better and safer caving equipment) made the specs freely available online.
so in other words:
elon musk’s e-vape spaceship submarine got beat out by a fuckin tech dinosaur, which was still viable SPECIFICALLY because of the altruism of volunteers working not for personal profit and glory but for public safety. that’s symbolism babey!!!!!
Related to this: one of the world-leading companies in the portable communications space (i.e. radios used by rescue services and in a whole lot of other industries) is a NZ company whose founder left it fully-owned by a charitable trust, with all profits re-invested in R&D or donated to charitable and educational causes. They also, at least in the mid-2000s, paid summer interns *very* well (which is how I know about them; a friend did one there years ago.)
The exploitative/extractive nature of high-tech companies, and Elon Musk’s personal wealth-building from his own companies, is entirely a choice.
When the last Toys ‘R’ Us store closes its doors once and for all, the company’s top executives will have pocketed some $8.2 million in retention bonuses for sticking around long enough to liquidate the company. Wall Street firms that loaded Toys ‘R’ Us with debt when they bought it in 2005 will have collected millions in fees from the company, even if they ultimately lost the majority of their investment. And employees like Ann Marie Reinhart, who worked as a supervisor at Toys ‘R’ Us for 29 years, will walk away with nothing.
Reinhart, 58, was a full-time supervisor at a Toys ‘R’ Us store in Durham, North Carolina, until she was laid off when her store closed in early April. Because Toys ‘R’ Us didn’t give her or her coworkers any severance, Reinhart is looking for a job and getting by on the wages her husband earns delivering auto parts.
“We can’t survive on his salary very long,” she said. “We’ve already dipped into our savings to pay bills.”
Reinhart is among the chain’s 30,000 employees who found out they would be laid off without severance when Toys ‘R’ Us announced it would close 735 stores in the US after failing to recover from bankruptcy. The company told workers in a March letter reviewed by BuzzFeed News that it has no money to pay severance — but even if it did have the cash, federal labor law doesn’t obligate it to do so.
Toys ‘R’ Us’s epic collapse illuminates Wall Street’s role in the retail apocalypse that has prompted a string of bankruptcies at private equity–backed retail companies, from Nine West, bought by Sycamore Partners in 2014, to Claire’s, bought by Apollo Management in 2007. Thirty-three percent of retail job losses from 2016 through 2017 resulted from private equity–backed store closures, according to a report from Inflection Capital Management, an equity management consulting firm. As the retail industry confronts the rise of e-commerce and rapidly changing consumer behaviors, many companies that took on debt in private equity buyouts to acquire cash are folding.
“It seems likely we’re about to see lots more bankruptcies like Toys ‘R’ Us, which means trouble for low-wage workers.”
“To be in retail now, you need to be unique; you need to offer something you can’t get online. And typically private equity firms tend to cut back,” Josh Kosman, author of The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Will Cause the Next Great Credit Crisis, told BuzzFeed News. “They’re not improving their stores and their product lines because the companies they buy have so much debt. So they’re not well-positioned to survive Amazon. And the consequences are, if revenue continues to fall, ultimately they will probably collapse.”
tora42's nonsensne 