Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is James Burkhardt, responding to a commenter who compared Elon Musk's silly server-destroying adventure to Alexander cutting the Gordian knot, and taking the analogy further:
Except after Alexander cut this knot, the ox cart kept dumping goods on the road, because the knot kept the whole handmade ox cart together. Alexander got the cart from his neighbor, whose land he was now managing. The old man, rather than build a new cart, had been patching the old one together just enough while making more and more runs to market. But Alexander didn't understand what the knot did, and while the old man told him the knot was important, rather than traace the knot and understand everything it tied together, Alexander just cut the knot.
It doesn't matter that it was built poorly. The backend Musk had is the backend Musk bought. Musk deciding he had a better backend because he said so doesn't change that doing what he did caused problems which were not going to help retain users and advertisers, which he desperately needs.
I will remind you again, Twitter made money before Musk. Its not the fault of old management that Musk is bad at basic math.
In second place, it's Ninja with another comment about the incident:
Every time I read something about Musk the idea that billionaires are some sort of geniuses and not parasites that happen to have inherited or built their fortune on precarious labor exploitation and either illegal or ethically questionable ways seem more and more distant.
Billionaires should not exist.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll stay on that post since two different anonymous commenters provided apropos quotes in response. First, it's a longer one:
Chesterton's fence
There exists ... a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
G. K. Chesterton wrote that in 1929. Ninety-plus years later, Musk hasn't learned the lesson.
Next, it's a short and sweet one:
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Diogenes with a comment about the DOJ's arguments for why the FTC should be investigating Elon Musk:
biased!
How can the FTC fairly investigate me when they already think I might have done something wrong? Biased!
In second place, it's an anonymous reply to a commenter trying to dismiss another comment with a quip about it being an attempted haiku:
Anonymous Dude
That was not a haiku there
It was snide mocking
For editor's choice on the funny side, we might as well wrap things up with two more comments from the post about Musk and the server, since people had lots of jokes. First, it's radix with a comment about the big padlocks from Home Depot that Musk used:
Hello, this is the Lock Picking Lawyer, and what I have for you today is....and it's open.
Finally, it's an anonymous comment about Musk's interesting theory on how floor weight tolerances work:
And each wheel touches trillions of floor molecules so the weight on each molecule is billionths of a gram. Checkmate stupid CEO!
That's all for this week, folks!