The legacy employees at Twitter didn’t know how to handle him

Tuesday, September 10th, 2024

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonOn December 22, 2022, Musk met with two of Twitter’s infrastructure managers, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), who tried to explain their problem:

The data-services company that housed one of Twitter’s server farms, located in Sacramento, had agreed to allow them some short-term extensions on their lease so they could begin to move out during 2023 in an orderly fashion. “But this morning,” the nervous manager told Musk, “they came back to us and said that plan was no longer on the table because, and these are their words, they don’t think that we will be financially viable.”

The facility was costing Twitter more than $100 million a year. Musk wanted to save that money by moving the servers to one of Twitter’s other facilities, in Portland, Oregon. Another manager at the meeting said that couldn’t be done right away. “We can’t get out safely before six to nine months,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic.”

[…]

He paused in silence for a few moments, then announced, “You have ninety days to do it. If you can’t make that work, your resignation is accepted.”

[…]

“I’ve built server centers myself, and I can tell if you could put more servers there or not. That’s why I asked if you had actually visited these facilities. If you’ve not been there, you’re just talking bullshit.”

[…]

“All you need to do is just move the fucking servers to Portland,” he said. “If it takes longer than thirty days, that would blow my mind.” He paused and recalculated. “Just get a moving company, and it will take a week to move the computers and another week to plug them in. Two weeks. That’s what should happen.” Everyone was silent. But Musk was still warming up. “If you got a goddamn U-Haul, you could probably do it by yourself.”

[…]

They were not sure how they would even get inside the data center at night, but one very surprised Twitter staffer, a guy named Alex from Uzbekistan, was still there. He merrily let them in and showed them around.

The facility, which housed rooms of servers for many other companies as well, was very secure, with a retinal scan required for entry into each of the vaults. Alex the Uzbek was able to get them into the Twitter vault, which contained about fifty-two hundred refrigerator-size racks of thirty computers each. “These things do not look that hard to move,” Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion, since each rack weighed about twenty-five hundred pounds and was eight feet tall.

“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods.

Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved. “Well that doesn’t seem super hard,” he said as Alex the Uzbek and the rest of the gang stared. Musk was totally jazzed by this point. It was, he said with a loud laugh, like a remake of Mission: Impossible, Sacramento edition.

The next day — Christmas Eve — Musk called in reinforcements. Ross Nordeen drove from San Francisco. He stopped at the Apple Store in Union Square and spent $2,000 to buy out the entire stock of AirTags so the servers could be tracked on their journey, and then stopped at Home Depot, where he spent $2,500 on wrenches, bolt-cutters, headlamps, and the tools needed to unscrew the seismic bolts. Steve Davis got someone from The Boring Company to procure a semi truck and line up moving vans. Other enlistees arrived from SpaceX.

The server racks were on wheels, so the team was able to disconnect four of them and roll them to the waiting truck. This showed that all fifty-two hundred or so could probably be moved within days. “The guys are kicking ass!” Musk exulted.

Other workers at the facility watched with a mix of amazement and horror. Musk and his renegade team were rolling servers out without putting them in crates or swaddling them in protective material, then using store-bought straps to secure them in the truck. “I’ve never loaded a semi before,” James admitted. Ross called it “terrifying.” It was like cleaning out a closet, “but the stuff in it is totally critical.”

[…]

Having ruined the Christmas Eve of the NTT managers, as well as hitting them with a potential loss of more than $100 million in revenue for the coming year, Musk showed pity and said he would suspend moving the servers for two days. But they would resume, he warned, the day after Christmas.

[…]

The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost.

[…]

The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. “By the time we learned this, the servers had already been unplugged and rolled out, so there was no way we would roll them back, plug them in, and then wipe them,” he says. Plus, the wiping software wasn’t working. “Fuck, what do we do?” he asked. Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them. So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says. “They all made it to Portland safely.”

By the end of the week they had used all of the available trucks in Sacramento. Despite the area being pummeled by rain, they moved more than seven hundred of the racks in three days. The previous record at that facility had been moving thirty in a month. That still left a lot of servers in the facility, but the musketeers had proven that they could be moved quickly. The rest were handled by the Twitter infrastructure team in January.

Elon had promised James a big bonus, up to $1 million, if he got the servers moved by the end of the year. Nothing was put in writing, but James trusted his cousin. After the move, he heard from Jared Birchall that the deal applied only to the number of servers that got up and running in Portland. Because they needed new electrical connections, that was zero. James texted Elon, who came back with the proposal that he would get $1,000 for every server that arrived safely in Portland, whether or not it was plugged in. That amounted to just over $700,000. Elon also offered him a stock option package to join Twitter. James accepted both.

[…]

“In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,” Musk would admit in March 2023. “I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had seventy thousand hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it.”

His most valuable lieutenants at Tesla and SpaceX had learned ways to deflect his bad ideas and drip-feed him unwelcome information, but the legacy employees at Twitter didn’t know how to handle him.

Posted in Business, Technology | 1 Comment »

The art of policing is in punishing infrequently and severely

Monday, September 9th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsOf all the Consulate’s policies, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the one to smash rural brigandage was among the most popular:

‘The art of policing is in punishing infrequently and severely,’ Napoleon believed, but in his war against the brigands who were terrorizing vast areas of France, he tended to punish both frequently and severely. Brigands could be royalist rebels (especially in western and southern France), groups of deserters or draft-dodgers, outlaws, highwaymen, simple ruffians or a combination of all these. The Ancien Régime, the Committee of Public Safety and the Directory had all fought against endemic lawlessness in the countryside, but the Consulate fought to win with every means at its disposal. Napoleon interned and deported suspected brigands, and used the death penalty against convicted ones, who were often called such unedifying names as ‘The Dragon’, ‘Beat-to-Death’ and ‘The Little Butcher of Christians’, and who raided isolated farmhouses as well as hijacking coaches and robbing travellers.

Although the gendarmerie or paramilitary police had been inaugurated in April 1798 with a force of 10,575 men, Napoleon reorganized it, increased its numbers to 16,500, paid it well and on time, improved its morale and stamped out most of the corruption within its ranks.

Patrols were increased and were mounted on horseback when before they had been on foot; special tribunals and military commissions guillotined suspects on circumstantial evidence without the right to a defence lawyer; and huge mobile columns were sent out which meted out summary justice. In November 1799, some 40 per cent of France was under martial law, but within three years it was safe to travel around France again, and trade could be resumed. Not even his Italian victories brought Napoleon more popularity.

In March 1800 the Consulate replaced more than 3,000 elected judges, public prosecutors and court presidents with its own appointees. Political opinions don’t seem to have been the deciding factor so much as practical expertise, as well as Napoleon’s keenness to sack elderly, corrupt or incompetent lawyers. It took seven months for the system to run smoothly again due to the backlogs, but thereafter the delivery of justice was improved.

In his bid to end some of the more symbolic aspects of the Revolution once he had declared it to be over, Napoleon ordered that the red bonnets that had been put on church steeples and public buildings during the Revolution be taken down. Monsieur and Madame replaced citoyen and citoyenne, Christmas and Easter returned, and finally, on January 1, 1806, the revolutionary calendar was abolished.

Napoleon had always been alive to the power of nomenclature and so he renamed the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV) as the Place de la Concorde, and demolished the giant female statue of Liberty there.

[…]

Other examples of his passion for renaming included rechristening his invention the Cisalpine Republic as the Italian Republic, the Army of England as the Grande Armée (in 1805), and the Place de l’Indivisibilité – the old Place Royale – as the Place des Vosges. Over the Consular period, Napoleon’s written style subtly altered, with revolutionary clichés such as inaltérable and incorruptible being replaced by the more incisive grand, sévère and sage.

Napoleon next went about persuading the émigrés — aristocrats, property-owners, royalists and priests who had fled during the Revolution — to return to France, on the understanding that they must not expect to get their property back. He eventually restored their voting and citizenship rights. In October 1800 he removed 48,000 émigrés’ names from the list of 100,000 proscribed during the Revolution, and in April 1802 all but 1,000 irreconcilable royalists were removed altogether.

[…]

By May 1803, some 90 per cent of all émigrés had returned to France, reversing the huge drain of talent that had so weakened the country.

Of the 281 prefects appointed by Napoleon between 1800 and 1814, as many as 110 (39 per cent) had been Ancien Régime nobles.

[…]

Napoleon instructed General d’Hédouville to deal with the rebels robustly: ‘If you make war, employ severity and activity; it is the only means by which you make it shorter, and consequently less deplorable for humanity.’

[…]

On January 17, 1800, Napoleon closed no fewer than sixty of France’s seventy-three newspapers, saying that he wouldn’t ‘allow the papers to say or do anything contrary to my interests’.

[…]

‘The printing press is an arsenal; it cannot be private property.’

[…]

France had no tradition of press freedom before the Revolution. Freedom of speech was declared to be a universal right in 1789, and the number of officially sanctioned journals ballooned from four to over three hundred, but the government started closing journals as early as 1792, and periodic purging on political grounds had brought the number down to seventy-three by 1799. Freedom of the press didn’t exist in Prussia, Russia or Austria at the time, and even in 1819 the British government passed the notorious Six Acts, which tightened the definition of sedition, and by which three editors were arraigned. That was in peacetime, whereas France in January 1800 was at war with five countries, each of which had vowed to overthrow its government. Objectionable by modern standards, Napoleon’s move was little other than standard practice for his time and circumstances.

[…]

‘My intention is that everything is printed, absolutely everything except obscene material and anything that might disturb the tranquillity of the State. Censorship should pay no attention to anything else.’

[…]

Ten days after announcing the results of the plebiscite in February 1800, the Consulate passed a law (by 71 to 25 in the Tribunate and 217 to 68 in the Legislative Body) placing the administration of all eighty-three departments or regions of France, which had been created in 1790 in an effort to devolve power, under prefects who were appointed by the minister of the interior. An essential element of local democracy established by the Revolution was thus completely abolished at a stroke, and brought about a massive concentration of power into Napoleon’s hands. Each department now had a centrally appointed prefect, with sub-prefects to look after the arrondissements and mayors for communes, who were also centrally appointed if they had more than 5,000 inhabitants in their charge.

[…]

Local self-government, in which after 1790 about one Frenchmen in thirty was a local official of some kind, was thus replaced by one in which initiative and control were vested ultimately in the First Consul.

[…]

As First Consul Napoleon made all public officials salaried servants of the state, ensured they were properly trained, and abolished promotion through corruption and nepotism, replacing it with rewards for talent and merit.

[…]

Boniface de Castellane-Novejean, prefect of the Basses-Pyrénées, summed up the prefect’s task as to ‘make sure that the taxes are paid, that the conscription is enacted, and that law and order is preserved’. In fact he also had to impound horses for the cavalry, billet troops, guard prisoners-of-war, stimulate economic development, deliver political support for the government at plebiscites and elections, fight brigands and represent the views of the department, especially its elites, to the government.

Only in areas in which Napoleon wasn’t interested, such as the relief of the poor and primary education, was much power left with the departments.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | No Comments »

The engines worked like giant vacuums

Sunday, September 8th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe Oxcart’s J-58 jet engines developed by Pratt and Whitney were finally delivered in 1963, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), but not without complications:

A host of new problems occurred when the engines were first powered up. In one instance, engineers suspected a foreign object was stuck in an engine’s heart, called the power plant, and was damaging internal parts. An X-ray showed the outline of a pen that had fallen into the engine’s cover, called a nacelle, during final assembly in Burbank. From then on, Lockheed workers got coveralls without breast pockets.

[…]

The engines worked like giant vacuums. Once powered up on the tarmac, they sucked in every loose object lying around, including rocks and metal screws. As a solution, Area 51 workers took to sweeping and then vacuuming the runway before each flight. It was a tedious but necessary job.

[…]

As the airplane reached higher speeds, the 500-plus-degree temperatures began melting electrical components, many of which had to be redesigned and rewired.

[…]

In the case of the Oxcart, the sonic shock unexpectedly caused the fuselage to flex in such a way that many structural parts became dangerously compromised. These parts had to be redesigned and replaced.

[…]

Every flight was like an operational mission, with navigators plotting a course and making maps days before as they worked to test the Oxcart’s inertial navigation system, or INS. “When you’re flying at that altitude and that speed, you need big checkpoints to validate information from the INS,” recalls navigator Sam Pizzo. “Any old geographical landmark, like a mountain or a river, would not do. The Oxcart traveled too fast. Pilots would have to look for landmarks on the scale of the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes,” says the veteran navigator. “You can’t imagine what new territory this was for a navigator. No amount of experience can prepare you when you work on an airplane that goes two or three times as fast as anything you navigated for before.”

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

A dye that helps to give Doritos their orange hue can also turn mouse tissues transparent

Saturday, September 7th, 2024

A dye that helps to give Doritos their orange hue can also turn mouse tissues transparent, researchers have found:

Applying the dye to the skin of live mice allowed scientists to peer through tissues at the structures below, including blood vessels and internal organs.

[…]

The technique works by changing how body tissues that are normally opaque interact with light. The fluids, fats and proteins that make up tissues such as skin and muscle have different refractive indices (a measurement of how much a material bends light): aqueous components have low refractive indices, whereas lipids and proteins have high ones. Tissues appear opaque because the contrast between these refractive indices causes light to be scattered. The researchers speculated that adding a dye that strongly absorbs light to such tissues could narrow the gap between the components’ refractive indices enough to make them transparent.

[…]

Several candidates emerged, but the team focused on tartrazine, or FD&C Yellow 5, a common dye used in many processed foods. “When tartrazine is dissolved in water, it makes water bend light more like fats do,” says Hong. A tissue containing fluids and lipids becomes transparent when the dye is added, because the light refraction of fluids matches that of lipids.

[…]

The researchers demonstrated tartrazine’s ability to render tissues transparent on thin slivers of raw chicken breast. They then massaged the dye into various areas of a live mouse’s skin. Applying the dye to the scalp allowed the team to scrutinize tiny zigzags of blood vessels; putting it on the abdomen offered a clear view of the mouse’s intestines contracting with digestion, and revealed other movements tied to breathing. The team also used the solution on the mouse’s leg, and were able to discern muscle fibres beneath the skin.

The technique can make tissues transparent only to a depth of around 3 millimetres, so it is currently of limited practical use for thicker tissues and larger animals.

I was immediately reminded of H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man:

“But I went to work—like a slave. And I had hardly worked and thought about the matter six months before light came through one of the meshes suddenly—blindingly! I found a general principle of pigments and refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular physics. In the books—the books that tramp has hidden—there are marvels, miracles! But this was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by which it would be possible, without changing any other property of matter—except, in some instances colours—to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air—so far as all practical purposes are concerned.”

“Phew!” said Kemp. “That’s odd! But still I don’t see quite … I can understand that thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but personal invisibility is a far cry.”

“Precisely,” said Griffin. “But consider, visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor reflect much from the general surface, but just here and there where the surfaces were favourable the light would be reflected and refracted, so that you would get a brilliant appearance of flashing reflections and translucencies—a sort of skeleton of light. A glass box would not be so brilliant, nor so clearly visible, as a diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection. See that? From certain points of view you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would be more visible than others, a box of flint glass would be brighter than a box of ordinary window glass. A box of very thin common glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost altogether, because light passing from water to glass is only slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in any way. It is almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen is in air. And for precisely the same reason!”

“Yes,” said Kemp, “that is pretty plain sailing.”

“And here is another fact you will know to be true. If a sheet of glass is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a powder, it becomes much more visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last an opaque white powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the surfaces of the glass at which refraction and reflection occur. In the sheet of glass there are only two surfaces; in the powder the light is reflected or refracted by each grain it passes through, and very little gets right through the powder. But if the white powdered glass is put into water, it forthwith vanishes. The powdered glass and water have much the same refractive index; that is, the light undergoes very little refraction or reflection in passing from one to the other.

“You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index could be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air.”

“Yes, yes,” said Kemp. “But a man’s not powdered glass!”

“No,” said Griffin. “He’s more transparent!”

Posted in Animals, Science | 2 Comments »

All of this is being done for a type of shooting that is actually very rare

Friday, September 6th, 2024

Democrats and Republicans can’t agree about how to regulate guns, Zaid Jilani notes, but they have succeeded in ”hardening” schools — putting more law enforcement in schools, implementing measures like metal detectors and reinforced doors, and requiring students in dozens of states to do active shooter drills:

And all of this is being done for a type of shooting that is actually very rare.

[…]

The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.

[…]

But this cycle of being terrorized and reacting to that terror can be self-defeating. A few years ago, I reported on a study showing that mass shootings seem to correlate to news coverage of mass shootings — when a big shooting happens and gets a lot of press coverage, we see a cluster of shootings pop up after that. We may be experiencing mass shootings in clusters the same way we see suicide clusters.

[…]

But most of America’s gun violence comes in two forms: suicides and routine homicides.

[…]

We are accustomed to the kinds of violence that takes place in certain neighborhoods of Chicago. There were 617 homicides in Chicago in 2023, (most of them committed with guns) and that’s a city of just over 2.5 million people. There were about 900 murders in the nation of Japan the same year. Japan has a population of 125 million people.

[…]

But it’s not a coincidence that America’s gun homicide problem is so heavily concentrated in a few places. Maine or Vermont, which have very few gun laws, are some of the safest states in the country.

[…]

From the 1990s through the 2010s, America cut gun murders in half.

How this happened is still debated to this day, but the consensus is that more effective policing played a big role. And this policing happened in an environment where gun restrictions didn’t get all that much tougher. So cracking down on serial violent offenders and more effectively addressing homicides by catching killers to reduce cycles of violence can work. Honor culture is most prevalent in places where people don’t trust the cops. So better policing can also help reduce the cultural factors that drive violence.

Can gun restrictions work? The reality is that tweaking background checks or banning the sale of boutique weapons (what the Democrats call assault weapons) is unlikely to make a big difference. America’s big killer is the handgun — ask any police department in America. And nobody’s proposing banning that (and it’s not clear our current courts would even allow us to).

But there are some gun reforms we can make on the margins that have been proven to work. The nonpartisan RAND Corporation did a review of all the big research and found that laws like safe storage laws that require parents to lock up their weapons properly to keep them away from children and increasing the age of purchase can help reduce accidental gun deaths and gun suicides. Keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers also seems to help, as does reducing the prevalence of stand-your-ground laws.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 9 Comments »

Combat vehicles don’t survive long in battle, so why build them to last?

Wednesday, September 4th, 2024

How to Make War by James Dunnigan In How to Make War, Jim Dunnigan notes that the Soviets cleverly economized in a way that had unexpected consequences:

Tank crews using Russian training methods are at a considerable disadvantage because they typically use their vehicles very little in training. Russian vehicles are built inexpensively and wear out quickly. The Russians have observed that combat vehicles don’t survive long in battle, so why build them to last? In peacetime, the crews train with crude simulators and spend less time in their vehicles than Western crews. In addition, Western armies have more effective crew simulators and training equipment. As the performance of U.S. tank crews in the Gulf War demonstrated, these differences in training levels were very evident on the battlefield.

He goes on to make another related point:

Tanks cannot move long distances without running into serious maintenance problems. Long movements require careful planning. If you run tanks too hard, most of them will break down. There have been many tank campaigns since 1939 where most of the losses have come from mechanical failure, not enemy action. Such losses can be reduced considerably by checking the route you plan to send tanks over and making provisions for regular maintenance. Tanks are simply not built to move more than a few hundred kilometers without stopping for maintenance. Weighing 40 to 70 tons and moving on tracks, they are designed for speeds of up to 60 kilometers an hour but not for long periods. Russian tanks break down, on average, every 250 kilometers. Western vehicles last about 300 kilometers.

Posted in War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson An hour before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), it disabled the routers of the American satellite company Viasat with a massive malware attack, which disabled the Ukrainian military’s command and control:

Top Ukrainian officials frantically appealed to Musk for help, and the vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, used Twitter to urge him to provide connectivity. “We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” he pleaded. Musk agreed. Two days later, five hundred terminals arrived in Ukraine.

[…]

The next day SpaceX sent two thousand more terminals via Poland. But Dreyer said that the electricity was off in some areas, so many of them wouldn’t work. “Let’s offer to ship some field solar+battery kits,” Musk replied. “They can have some Tesla Powerwalls or Megapacks too.” The batteries and solar panels were soon on their way.

[…]

Unlike every other company and even parts of the U.S. military, they were able to find ways to defeat Russian jamming. By Sunday, the company was providing voice connections for a Ukrainian special operations brigade. Starlink kits were also used to connect the Ukrainian military to the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and to get Ukrainian television broadcasts back up. Within days, six thousand more terminals and dishes were shipped, and by July there were fifteen thousand Starlink terminals operating in Ukraine.

[…]

Starlink contributed about half of the cost of the dishes and services it provided. “How many have we donated so far?” Musk wrote Dreyer on March 12. She replied, “2000 free Starlinks and monthly service. Also, 300 heavily discounted to Lviv IT association and we waived the monthly service for ~5500.” The company soon donated sixteen hundred additional terminals, and Musk estimated its total contribution to be around $80 million.

[…]

Although he had readily supported Ukraine, his foreign policy instincts were those of a realist and student of European military history. He believed that it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014. The Russian ambassador had warned him, in a conversation a few weeks earlier, that attacking Crimea would be a red line and could lead to a nuclear response.

[…]

Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

[…]

Musk replied that the design of the drones was impressive, but he refused to turn the coverage for Crimea back on, arguing that Ukraine “is now going too far and inviting strategic defeat.” He discussed the situation with Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and chairman of the joint chiefs, General Mark Milley, explaining to them that SpaceX did not wish Starlink to be used for offensive military purposes. He also called the Russian ambassador to assure him that Starlink was being used for defensive purposes only. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” Musk says. “We did not want to be a part of that.”

[…]

He took it upon himself to help find an end to the Ukrainian war, proposing a peace plan that included new referenda in the Donbas and other Russian-controlled regions, accepting that Crimea was a part of Russia, and assuring that Ukraine remained a “neutral” nation rather than becoming part of NATO. It provoked an uproar. “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you,” tweeted Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany. President Zelenskyy was a bit more cautious. He posted a poll on Twitter asking, “Which Elon Musk do you like more?: One who supports Ukraine, or One who supports Russia.”

[…]

“SpaceX’s out of pocket cost to enable and support Starlink in Ukraine is ~$80M so far,” he wrote in response to Zelenskyy’s question. “Our support for Russia is $0. Obviously, we are pro Ukraine.” But then he added, “Trying to retake Crimea will cause massive death, probably fail and risk nuclear war. This would be terrible for Ukraine and Earth.”

[…]

Providing humanitarian help was fine, but private companies should not be financing a foreign country’s war. That should be left to the government, which is why the U.S. has a Foreign Military Sales program that puts a layer of protection between private companies and foreign governments. Other companies, including big and profitable defense contractors, were charging billions to supply weapons to Ukraine, so it seemed unfair that Starlink, which was not yet profitable, should do it for free. “We initially gave the Ukrainians free service for humanitarian and defense purposes, such as keeping up their hospitals and banking systems,” she says. “But then they started putting them on fucking drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers. That’s what companies and people should do. But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.”

[…]

An agreement was struck that the Pentagon would pay SpaceX $145 million to cover the service.

But then the story leaked, igniting a backlash against Musk in the press and Twitterverse. He decided to withdraw his request for funding. SpaceX would provide free service indefinitely for the terminals that were already in Ukraine. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

Shotwell thought that was ridiculous. “The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally. Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”

[…]

“Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

[…]

More than 100,000 new dishes were sent to Ukraine at the beginning of 2023. In addition, Starlink launched a companion service called Starshield, which was specifically designed for military use. SpaceX sold or licensed Starshield satellites and services to the U.S. military and other agencies, allowing the government to determine how they could and should be used in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology, War | No Comments »

Napoleon’s second coup had taken a little longer than the first, but it was just as bloodless and successful

Sunday, September 1st, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew Roberts Having pulled off a coup the previous day, Napoleon was intent on conducting a second as soon as was practicable, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), against his chief co-conspirator:

Sieyès had already written two constitutions for France, in 1791 and 1793, and Napoleon did not believe the Revolution would be safeguarded by his third, which was packed with checks and balances to centralized power. He later wrote of Sieyès, ‘He was not a man of action: knowing little of men’s natures, he did not know how to make them act. His studies having always led him down the path of metaphysics.’

[…]

Sieyès clearly saw himself as this philosopher-king, with Napoleon as his consul for war and Ducos for the interior. This was very different from how Napoleon viewed the situation.

[…]

Article 41 of the new constitution stated: ‘The First Consul promulgates laws; he names and dismisses at his pleasure members of the Conseil d’État, ministers and ambassadors and other chief foreign agents, officers of the army and navy, the members of local administrations and government commissioners attached to the courts.’

He also had treaty-making powers, would live at the Tuileries and would receive 500,000 francs per annum, fifty times an ambassador’s salary. It was thus very clear, right from the beginning, where true power lay; the second and third consuls would also live at the Tuileries but they would draw only 150,000 francs per annum for their roles as constitutional figleafs.

The Consulate issued a spate of decrees aimed at making the new regime popular and, in its own phrase, ‘completing the Revolution’. Versailles was turned over to wounded soldiers; a vicious anti-émigré law was repealed, with Napoleon going personally to the Temple prison to set hostages free; the police were ordered not to harass returning émigrés or to make them take out forced ‘loans’; and the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and 1 Vendémiaire (the republican New Year’s Day) were made public holidays. Pensions would be awarded to the war-wounded as well as to soldiers’ widows and orphans and non-juring priests were no longer deported for refusing to take the Constitutional Oath.

A full ten days of mourning was ordained for George Washington, who died in December, despite the fact that France and America were still fighting the Quasi-War; in the public eulogies to ‘the American Cincinnatus’, analogies were drawn between Washington and Napoleon.

[…]

‘A newly born government must dazzle and astonish,’ he told Bourrienne at this time. ‘When it ceases to do that it fails.’

The appointment of a distinguished scientist like Laplace to such a high-profile post made it clear that, just because Napoleon was a soldier and Brumaire had been a military coup, this was emphatically not a military dictatorship.

[…]

‘If I die within three or four years of fever in my bed,’ Napoleon told Roederer the following year, ‘I will say to the nation to watch out against military government. I will tell it to appoint a civil magistrate.’

Fouché predictably became minister of police and Martin Gaudin, a former high official in the treasury who had served every regime since Louis XVI, was appointed finance minister. Gaudin quickly set about reforming the fiendishly complex French tax code and lowering rates. Financial management moved from local authorities to the finance ministry and the whole public accounting system was eventually centralized.

Napoleon quickly established a central system for the payment of the army, hitherto done through the departments, a classic example of how he was able to slice through bureaucracy and implement a much-needed reform without delay.

[…]

Napoleon’s second coup had taken a little longer than the first, but it was just as bloodless and successful.

[…]

As he was to write of Julius Caesar, ‘In such a state of affairs these deliberative assemblies could no longer govern; the person of Caesar was therefore the guarantee of the supremacy of Rome in the universe, and of the security of citizens of all parties. His authority was therefore legitimate.’ His attitude to the government of France in 1799 was identical.

‘Frenchmen!’ Napoleon proclaimed on December 15, ‘A Constitution is presented to you. It ends the uncertainties … [in] the internal and military situation of the Republic … The Constitution is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty … Citizens, the Revolution is established on the principles which began it. It is finished.’

The placing of property rights before those of equality and liberty was indicative of how Napoleon intended to defend the interests of tradesmen, employers, strivers and the owners of the biens nationaux — the kind of people who struggled to run small businesses like a mulberry orchard. These were France’s backbone; he understood their concerns and needs.

Article 94 of the ninety-five-article constitution (less than a quarter the length of the previous one) stated categorically that the property and lands of the monarchy, Church and aristocracy which had been taken and sold during the Revolution would never be returned to their original owners. These were promises Napoleon reiterated in 1802 and 1804, but he did not promise further redistribution.

When he spoke of equality, he meant equality before the law and not of economic situation.

[…]

So long as they were respectful, members of the Conseil were invited to be as outspoken as they felt was necessary, and Napoleon encouraged debate between them. Under the new constitution the Conseil was both the final court of appeal in administrative law cases and the body responsible for the examination of the wording of bills before they went before the legislature, functions it still retains today.

[…]

At 8 a.m. on December 25 (Christmas Day was not officially recognized again until 1802) the Constitution of the Year VIII came into force.

[…]

There was plenty more in the new constitution to calm the nation: authorities could enter a Frenchman’s home without invitation only in the case of fire or flood; citizens could be held for no more than ten days without trial; ‘harshness used in arrests’ would be a crime.

[…]

Within a week of Brumaire, as a result of the new sense of stability, efficiency and sheer competence, the franc–dollar and franc–pound exchange rates had doubled. By the end of January 1800 100-franc government bonds that had been languishing at 12 francs had soared to 60 francs. Two years later, partly by forcing the tax-collecting authorities to make deposits in advance of estimated yields, the finance minister Martin Gaudin had balanced the budget for the first time since the American War of Independence.

On taking power, Napoleon had made it clear that the new Constitution of the Year VIII would be legitimized by a nationwide plebiscite of all French citizens, taking place over several days at the end of January and beginning of February 1800. All adult males could vote by signing a register, which was kept open for three days. In order to make certain of a positive outcome Napoleon replaced Laplace as interior minister with his brother Lucien in December. On February 7 Lucien formally announced the results of the plebiscite, asserting that 3,011,007 Frenchmen had voted in favour of the Constitution of the Year VIII and only 1,562 against.35 It was of course ludicrous to claim that 99.95 per cent of Frenchmen had voted yes, even on the low turnout of 25 per cent – which can in part be blamed on the weather and lack of transportation for a rural population – not least because the Midi and Vendée were still rife with royalism.

[…]

There are over four hundred bundles of votes in the Archives Nationales which show clear proof of the systematic falsification of the results by Lucien in his own handwriting.

[…]

Napoleon was always going to win by a huge landslide, yet the Bonapartists simply couldn’t resist exaggerating even those numbers, thereby allowing the opposition – neo-Jacobins, royalists, liberals, moderates and others – to argue in their salons and underground cells that the whole process was a fraud. So often, when it came to manipulating battle casualties, or inserting documents into archives, or inventing speeches to the Army of Italy, or changing ages on birth certificates, or painting Napoleon on a rearing horse crossing the Alps, Napoleon and his propagandists simply went one unnecessary step too far, and as a result invited ridicule and criticism of what were genuinely extraordinary achievements.

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They would call them Blackbirds

Sunday, September 1st, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenAfter Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins’ experimental spy plane crashed, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA redoubled its efforts to keep the project secret:

Declassified in 2007 and never before made public, the CIA had been monitoring phone conversations of journalists who seemed interested in the Oxcart program. “Mr. Marvin Miles, Aviation Editor, Los Angeles Times, telephonically contacted Westinghouse Corp., Pittsburgh, attempting to confirm if employees of that firm were traveling covertly to ‘the desert’ each week in connection with top secret Project which he suspects may have ‘CIA’ association,” read one memo. Another stated that “Mr. Robert Hotz, Editor Aviation Week, indicated his awareness of developments at Burbank.” Of particular concern to the Agency was an article in the Hartford Courant that referred to the “secret development” of the J-58 engine. Another article in the Fontana, California, paper the Herald News speculated about the existence of Area 51, calling it a “super secret Project site.” An increasingly suspicious CIA worked overtime to monitor journalists, and they also monitored regular citizens, including a Los Angeles–based taxi driver who was described in a memo marked “classified” as once having asked a Pratt and Whitney employee if he was “en route to Nevada.”

The Agency should have been more concerned about its rival:

Just as it had with the U-2, the Pentagon moved in on the CIA’s spy plane territory. Only with the Oxcart, the Air Force ordered not one but three Air Force variants for its stable. One version, the YF-12A, would be used as an interceptor aircraft, its camera bay retrofitted to hold two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. The second Oxcart variant the Air Force ordered could carry a drone on its back. The third was a two-seater version of the CIA’s stealth spy plane, only instead of being designed to conduct high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance missions over enemy territory during peacetime, the Air Force supersonic spy plane was meant to go in and take pictures of enemy territory immediately after a nuclear strike by U.S. bomber planes—to see if any strategic targets had been missed. Designated the RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally inverted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech. Since the president is rarely ever “corrected,” the Air Force changed its letter designation, which is how the SR-71 Blackbird got its name. (Originally, the letters stood for “Reconnaissance/ Strike.”)

[…]

The Air Force had already spent eight hundred million dollars developing the B-70 bomber airplane — a massive, triangle-shaped, Mach 3, six-engined bomber that had been General LeMay’s passion project since its inception in 1959. When a fleet of eighty-five of these giant supersonic bombers was first proposed to Congress, LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Command, had his proposition met with cheers. But the Gary Powers shoot-down in May of 1960 had exposed the vulnerability of LeMay’s B-70 bombers, which would fly at the same height as the U-2. In 1963 LeMay was no longer head of the Strategic Air Command — instead, he was President Kennedy’s Air Force chief of staff. Despite evidence showing the B-70 bomber was not a practical airplane, LeMay was not about to give up his beloved bomber without a fight.

When the CIA first briefed President Kennedy on how high and how fast the A-12 Oxcart would fly, the president was astonished. His first question, according to CIA officer Norman Nelson, was “Could it be converted into a long-range bomber to replace the B-70?” LeMay was in the room when Kennedy asked the question. The thought of losing his pet program to the Agency drove General LeMay wild. He lobbied the Pentagon to move forward with the B-70, and he stepped up his public relations campaign, personally promoting the B-70 bomber program in magazine interviews from Aviation Week to Reader’s Digest. He was committed to appealing to as many Americans as possible, from aviation buffs to housewives. But by 1963, Kennedy was leaning toward canceling the B-70. In a budget message, he called it “unnecessary and economically unjustifiable.” Congress cut back its B-70 order even further. The original order for eighty-five had already been cut down to ten, and now Congress cut that to four.

[…]

“Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby anymore against the B-70,” LeMay said. Provided Kelly Johnson complied, LeMay promised to send Lockheed an Air Force purchase order for an interceptor version of Lockheed’s A-12 Oxcart, in addition to the preexisting order. For Lockheed, this would mean a big new invoice to send to the Air Force. At first, Kelly Johnson was suspicious of LeMay’s sincerity. That changed just a few weeks later when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed up at the Skunk Works with the secretary of the Air Force and the assistant secretary of defense in tow. Now McNamara asked for a briefing on the A-12, during which he took “copious notes.” Within a matter of months, the Pentagon ordered twenty-five more A-12 variants. The Pentagon already had a catchy name for its versions of the Oxcart. They would call them Blackbirds. Black because they had been developed in the dark by the CIA, and birds because they could fly.

[…]

The CIA did all of the heavy lifting to get the aircraft aloft, only to have the program eventually taken over by the Pentagon for the Air Force.

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