Monthly Archives: May 2020

Extending the Brexit transition period – Third Force News

Posted: May 2, 2020 at 2:47 pm

Maria Fletcher says the UK Government must do the right thing and extend the Brexit transition period

30th April 2020 by TFN Guest

Having claimed to have got Brexit done on 31 January 2020, the Johnson Government was adamant that the post-Brexit transition period would end on 31 December 2020. As of today, it remains adamant of this but given the intervening and ongoing impact of the coronavirus pandemic, it is under increasing pressure to ask for a prolongation of the transition period for up to two years. The deadline for a joint EU-UK agreed extension is 30 June 2020.

In normal times, completing negotiations on the UKs future relationship with the EU - including UKs border, internal security, immigration, organisational infrastructure - in the 11 months set by the UK Government was a tall order. However, the enormity of the task became even clearer as negotiating approaches were published in February 2020 and the gulf between the UK and the EU positions on key issues (such as the so-called level playing field), fisheries and security cooperation became clear.

Since then, the outbreak and deadly spread of the coronavirus has ushered in extraordinary times. This led first, to the disruption and halting of negotiations. Then on 15 April to the agreed resumption of negotiations with three weekly rounds starting on 20 April, 11 May and 1 June. The negotiations are by now, inevitably, considerably behind the agreed schedule, and made much harder by the lack of in person contact. After the first round of resumed negotiations last week, it was clear that the sides remained far apart.

It may seem odd to be worrying about Brexit at this time of a pandemic but the two are connected.

A growing number of voices at home and abroad are putting pressure on the UK Government to secure an extension to avoid compounding the economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic with a hugely disruptive and disorderly Brexit. As is looking increasingly likely, if a future EU-UK deal cannot be agreed by the end of the year, this puts another feared no-deal/cliff-edge scenario back on the table. And with the best will in the world, no other world leaders are in a position to negotiate a trade deal with the UK before the end of the year. As civil society battles to limit the huge crisis posed to the wellbeing of vulnerable groups by Covid-19, the potential harmful impacts of Brexit (loss of rights, legal remedies, connectivity, funding) post no-deal transition loom even larger for the sector and the individuals and groups they serve.

Maria Fletcher

An additional, unnecessary economic shock (and potential security crisis), causing further uncertainty, pain and worry for businesses, civil society and individuals is surely not the choice of a prudent or decent government. Yes, the UK Government may lose some face amongst some of its party-faithful. Yes, additional payments will need to be paid to the EU should an extension be secured - but that would still be a small price to pay given the probable alternative. The UK Governments outcomes are simply not attainable in the current extraordinary circumstances. A policy U-turn would be the sign of a strong, not weak, government.

The legal and procedural hurdles to an extension of the post-Brexit transition period are numerous indeed, but not insurmountable; the key will be having the requisite political will, and soon. As odd and disappointing as it might immediately seem to certain factions of the British press, Conservative Party and the wider electorate, it would be the act of a responsible and caring Government to seek an extension to the transition period.

Maria Fletcher is a senior law lecturer at the University of Glasgow and SULNE. She was writing on behalf of The Civil Society Brexit Project, find out more at http://www.civilsocietybrexit.scot

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How Kronborg Castle helped to inspire Shakespeare | Latest Brexit news and top stories – The New European

Posted: at 2:47 pm

PUBLISHED: 21:49 29 April 2020 | UPDATED: 21:49 29 April 2020

Charlie Connelly

An aerial image of Kronborg Castle, Helsingr (Photo by Blom UK via Getty Images)

2010 Blom UK

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We all have little jobs around the house that weve planning to get around to for years in some cases. One of mine was going through a big box of old DVDs that needed sorting out and last week it took a global pandemic for me to finally sit cross-legged on the floor and get thoroughly stuck in at last.

In the middle of matching loose discs to their correct cases I came across one orphan with no identifying marks. Slipping it into the player I closed the drawer and pressed play, at which the television screen, from which I was sitting no more than four feet, was suddenly filled completely by my own stupid face. I reeled backwards and let out a yelp that brought my wife running in from the other room.

When this understandable alarm had diminished to manageable proportions I realised to my disappointment this wasnt some kind of time-travelling message from a future me assuring us of a post-virus world of greater European unity and a government with a philosophy based on kindness and tolerance. Instead it was a film Id presented for the BBC about 15 years ago on the subject of literary Denmark.

A prime-time series that profiled nice places to go seems even further off now than it ever did, but there it was on the screen so that kind of thing definitely happened in the olden days, a prelapsarian era when people didnt only leave their homes at will but went to places that werent the supermarket. Good times.

We sat and watched, taunted by the younger me driving around Zealand babbling about Hans Christian Andersen then parking my behind on Karen Blixens writing chair as if driving around, babbling and sitting on other peoples chairs was the most natural thing in the world.

One part of the film in particular invoked a particularly profound sense of yearning, especially this week marking the anniversary of Shakespeares birth and death. Kronborg Castle sits on a nipple of land on the eastern coast of Zealand, looking out across the resund strait towards the Swedish town of Helsingborg thats so close you can see traffic moving along the opposite shore. Its a perfect castle location at the narrowest point of the strait, and at the height of Danish military power in the late 16th century Frederick II had turned it into a formidable fortress that exacted lucrative tolls on all shipping going in and out of the Baltic Sea. Its a combination of beautiful Renaissance architectural flourishes turrets in three corners with ornate copper roofs that have gone bright green with age and a forbidding military structure of considerable size that from the water must look absolutely impregnable.

The reason I was there and babbling on screen was that Kronborg is also the setting for Hamlet. Helsingr, the Danish town that huddles behind its military protector, is the Elsinore of the play, estimated to have been written by the Bard at the dawn of the 17th century.

Watching myself wandering around the castle led me to a thought process free of social isolation to some of the Shakespeare locations Ive visited over the years. Theres the house in Stratford-upon-Avon in which he was born, of course, and visiting his grave inside the parish church was an experience I found more moving than I expected. Ordinarily both these sites of literary pilgrimage would be absolutely packed this week, but possibly for the first time since the Shakespeare revival started in earnest during the late 18th century they will be padlocked and deserted, empty like the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart described by Claudius to Laertes in Hamlet.

I thought too of some the productions Ive seen, from a magical rendering of A Midsummer Nights Dream in the perfect setting of Regents Park Open Air Theatre to an RSC production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at Stratford-upon-Avon a couple of years ago that contained enough anti-Brexit asides to recruit the Bard firmly to the Remain cause.

And a Remainer he would certainly have been. Like every jobbing actor and playwright of the period worth their salt, Shakespeare worked with one eye permanently on the rest of Europe. The companies of the day earned as much of their corn touring abroad as they did treading the boards at home. There are frustratingly large gaps in what we know of Shakespeares life, long periods in which we have no idea where he was or what he was doing. Its likely that, certainly in his younger days, he spent chunks of that time trundling around the continent with a bunch of other actors in a cart loaded with props, costumes and bits of scenery.

English performers were hugely popular on the continent in Shakespeares day. Indeed the first theatre ever built in Poland, in Danzig around 1600, was designed specifically to accommodate English touring companies. It became part of a well-trodden circuit that encompassed what are now Czech and German lands, the Baltics and Scandinavia including Kronborg.

Well never know if Shakespeare actually showed up at Kronborg but the references in Hamlet have just enough detail to suggest detailed knowledge of the place, even if it wasnt the man himself who was able to provide it.

On the day I visited I was able to walk the outer ramparts where in the opening scene of Hamlet the ghost of the princes murdered father Claudius spooks the guards and sets in train the events of the play. I stood beneath the windows of the apartments constructed for the use of the royal family, where Claudius would have lingered and died. I poked my head into the chapel where Claudius prayed before confronting his queen and Hamlets mother Gertrude.

I strolled through the banqueting hall in which ancient tapestries hung, one of which could well have been the arras behind which Ophelias father Polonius met his end (watching the DVD confirmed that the poor old Polonius, eh? Stabbed in the arras line I introduced to the script was cut for the broadcast even though I delivered it perfectly after jumping out from behind what might have been the actual arras). And I walked through the courtyard with Karen, the woman then in charge of the annual performances of Hamlet that take place right there, in the open air, on the very spot Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote the play more than 400 years ago. Ghosts of some of the greatest actors in the world flit around here, soliloquising and dilly-dallying, making everything in the courtyard feel like a play within a play.

If we dont know whether Shakespeare actually visited Kronborg we can be sure that three people he knew very well definitely did. In 1586 the castle had just been extensively modernised by Frederick II and that year three English actors arrived, engaged for the summer to mark the fortresss rebirth at the request of the Danish ambassador to London. They were Will Kempe, George Bryan and Thomas Pope, known associates of Shakespeare, when all four were part of the Lord Chamberlains Men troupe, to the extent that the Bard even wrote roles with Kempe specifically in mind. Hence when he came to write Hamlet, modernising an ancient tale just after the castle itself had been modernised, and set it at Kronborg, Shakespeare had expert location knowledge to call on even if he hadnt seen the place for himself.

The annual performances at the castle have attracted some of the biggest names in the acting profession. Hamlet is a role to which every actor aspires, but the chance to play the prince in the intended setting of the play has proved intoxicating to leading men from many different countries. The first performance took place in 1816. It was two years after Britain and Denmark had signed a peace treaty towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars and happened also to be the bicentenary of the playwrights death.

Danish soldiers garrisoned at Kronborg staged the play, with a young lieutenant named Nicolai Peter Nielsen in the title role who would go on to be one of Denmarks finest actors after he left the army. This was no knockabout version either: a special prologue was written for the occasion by the poet Adam Oehlenschlger that concluded, Here Hamlet is played; outside on the terrace path the spirit itself walks by.

The current tradition began in 1937, when the Old Vic company came over from London, a production directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and Viven Leigh as Ophelia (and an up and coming 23-year-old called Alec Guinness as Osric). The first night was washed out by rain and transferred to a nearby ballroom but the following evening the sun shone and 2,500 people witnessed a performance from Olivier that had the man from the Times declaring, When Hamlet came out it was indeed as if time had for the moment got out of step with reality.

The following year saw a German production starring the great German actor Gustaf Grndgens in a performance attended by Hermann Gring, who happened to be holidaying nearby on his yacht. But in 1939, as the shadow of war loomed over Europe, John Gielgud arrived to a fusillade of cannon and a brass band playing Its a Long Way to Tipperary with Fay Compton leaving her sick bed in London to play Ophelia.

Karen Blixen was in the audience. Between the acts, I went backstage on the Bastion and smoked a cigarette with Hamlet in his long cape, she wrote afterwards. The evening was so clear and full of stars I might have really entered Shakespeares world.

Since then a succession of household names have played the Dane at Elsinore including Richard Burton, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, Simon Russell Beale and Jude Law. A BBC production was filmed there in 1964 to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeares birth, directed by Philip Saville with Christopher Plummer as Hamlet and Michael Caine as Horatio.

Companies from across Europe and beyond have staged Hamlet at Kronborg, above the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles oer his base into the sea which is not, in truth, that dreadful a summit but hey, Shakespeare wasnt writing a documentary. The roster of Hamlets reminds us of better times, of European integration and the ability we take for granted to wander across continents. What better time to appreciate them than in the week marking the beginning and the end of the life of Shakespeare, the European?

They should still have left my arras joke in, though. Philistines.

Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press with your support. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.

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How Kronborg Castle helped to inspire Shakespeare | Latest Brexit news and top stories - The New European

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Brexit: EU Trade Talks Could Collapse in June over Fishing, Regulations – Breitbart

Posted: at 2:47 pm

Negotiating sources on both sides of the English Channel have admitted that UK-EU trade talks could collapse in June over fishing and regulations.

The British government revealed in February that if sufficient progress is not made on a trade deal with the EU by June, then Londons negotiators would pull out of talks and the government would spend the rest of the transition period preparing to move the UK onto World Trade Organization (WTO) terms with the bloc.

Following the two parties recommencing negotiations since the coronavirus, one British source told The Times:If they [the EU] continue to insist on their position on a so-called level playing field and on continuing the common fisheries policy, for example, we are never going to accept that.

The level playing field relates to the European Commissions position that the UK must continue to abide by regulations on the environment, taxation, and government subsidies so that Brexit Britain does not represent a competitive risk to the EU.

The EUs chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said last week that the UK could not both refuse to extend the transition period and refuse to surrender on regulatory alignment and fishing. The EU demands that France and other member-states have continued access to Britains lucrative fishing waters.

Sources speaking to The Telegraph have said that the EU wants the existing conditions set out by the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) maintained. EU fishermen currently have rights to access more than 60 per cent of all landings by weight in British waters. By fish, the quota varies, however, with the French getting 84 per cent of English Channel cod compared to the UKs paltry nine per cent.

The UKs source told the newspaper that unless the EU shifted on fishing demands, negotiations would be over by the summer.

There are some fundamentals that were not going to change, nor going to move on. Because they are not so much negotiating positions as theyre sort of what an independent state does, the source told The Telegraph.

An independent state has independent control over coastal waters what we are wanting now is an EU understanding that we are not going to subordinate our laws to them in any areas, they added.

The source said that if the EU does not submit to the UK sovereign rights, then preparing for a WTO relationship will become the primary focus of effort.

However, one of the governments senior ministers admitted that the UK is not working on any contingency arrangements for a WTO relationship, weakening the UKs negotiating hand in revealing that the government is not serious in preparing the country to be a fully independent nation.

Michael Gove had said on Monday:We dont have any plans to stand up operation Yellowhammer [government no-deal planning] again because we are confident we will secure an agreement.

Brussels interpretation of Mr Goves remarks was unsurprising, with one diplomat confident that the UK will blink first.

The diplomatic source told The Guardian:If No 10 doesnt change its negotiating approach, we will very likely be looking at a no-deal scenario. So we take this statement [on the positive chances of a deal by Michael Gove] as a welcome sign that the UK will change its negotiating stance.

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Brexit: EU Trade Talks Could Collapse in June over Fishing, Regulations - Breitbart

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Coronavirus lockdown: Brexit talks could be eased with informal Zoom drinks over video conference – inews

Posted: at 2:46 pm

NewsPoliticsBrexitSources say lack of informal talks during negotiations has become a major downside

Thursday, 30th April 2020, 3:45 pm

Trade discussions between Westminster and Brussels have been continuing despite the social distancing restrictions using the video conferencing platform Zoom.

The i politics newsletter cut through the noise

The latest round of negotiations took place last week, ending in a fresh impasse, with both sides demanding compromise or risk the talks collapsing entirely.

Brexit quarantinis?

One UK source close to the talks said part of the problem was the inability of either party to go for informal coffees or drinks at the side of the negotiating table, to try and forge a way forward.

The insider stated there were pros and cons to having to conduct the negotiations over Zoom, with one major advantage that there was no need to have large numbers of people hanging around waiting to be involved in their specific area.

But the source added the downside is you cant take people off for a coffee and have those informal discussions alongside the formal talks.

"We will have to be tolerant of each other, what is more difficult is replicating the atmospherics," the source said.

Socialising via video conference has become a common pastime for people across the globe during the pandemic crisis, with some even arranging virtual pub quizzes.

Asked whether both sides could try to replicate informal talks by having "virtual drinks after work" to ease the tension in the negotiations, the senior UK source said: "We havent planned anything like that yet to have informal discussions. I dont see any reason why we shouldnt do it, we are all inventing new ways of doing it."

Concentrate minds

The source quipped: I am always willing to have a drink with anybody.

Much of Boris Johnsons success in securing a Brexit divorce deal last October has been attributed to his decision to hold informal discussions with the Taosieach Leo Varadkar on the Wirral.

Earlier this week, Michael Gove suggested to MPs that the Covid-19 outbreak could increase the chances of the UK sealing a trade agreement with Brussels, claiming it may concentrate the minds of EU negotiators.

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Government should stop grandstanding over Brexit | London Business News – London Loves Business

Posted: at 2:46 pm

Extending the Brexit transition period would provide much needed reassurance to the economy, say leading tax and advisory firmBlickRothenberg.

David Hough, a business advisory partner at the firm said: It is disappointing that the Government are refusing to countenance extending the deadline for a trade deal beyond the current deadline of 31 December.

He added: Both the UK and the EU have more pressing concerns at this time and extending the Transition period,ideallyfor at least a year, would provide some much-needed reassurance to the economy, and just as importantly allow Government to focus on matters currently at hand.

The Government may well ultimately secure a good trade deal but now is not the time for grandstanding.Business needsreassurance now as it contemplates how to come out of the lock down.

Hough said: For the last few weeks business owners have been working out how to address the immediate challenges they were facing of generating short term cash flow and finding the best way to look after as many employees as they can.

He added: The risk of a second peak later in the year should not be discounted and the ability, and means, to negotiate a trade deal would be significantly impacted by this if the UK has allowed 1 July 2020, the date an extension has to be legislated, to pass.

Allowing for the time required for approvals by the UK and EU States that means that an extension needs to be agreed in principle by probably no later than the end of May.

Hough said: The reassurance that an extension would bring is important because certainty improves the quality of forecasting which makes lenders and investors more willing to part with their money, giving businesses the platform to trade with confidence rather than simply trading to survive.

This will be crucial in re-igniting the economy and to reduce the reliance on Government grants.

Elon Musk | Biography & Facts | Britannica

Posted: May 1, 2020 at 4:19 pm

Elon Musk, (born June 28, 1971, Pretoria, South Africa), South African-born American entrepreneur who cofounded the electronic-payment firm PayPal and formed SpaceX, maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was also one of the first significant investors in, as well as chief executive officer of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla.

Elon Musk | SpaceX

Posted: at 4:19 pm

Elon Musk leads Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), where he oversees the development and manufacturing of advanced rockets and spacecraft for missions to and beyond Earth orbit.

Founded in 2002, SpaceXs mission is to enable humans to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species by building a self-sustaining city on Mars. In 2008, SpaceXs Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel launch vehicle to orbit the Earth. Following that milestone, NASA awarded SpaceX with contracts to carry cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS). A global leader in commercial launch services, SpaceX is the first commercial provider to launch and recover a spacecraft from orbit, attach a commercial spacecraft to the ISS and successfully land an orbital-class rocket booster. By pioneering the development of fully and rapidly reusable rockets and spacecraft, SpaceX is dramatically reducing the cost of access to space, the first step in making life on Mars a reality in our lifetime.

Elon also leads Tesla, which makes electric cars, giant batteries and solar products.Previously, Elon co-founded and sold PayPal, the world's leading Internet payment system, and Zip2, one of the first internet maps and directions services, which helped bring major publishers, including the New York Times and Hearst, online.

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Elon Musk | SpaceX

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Elon Musks 42,000 StarLink Satellites Could Just Save The …

Posted: at 4:19 pm

Elon Musks other company, SpaceX, is building Starlink, a global communications constellation that could approach a staggering 42,000 satellites. And it could be all that stands between us and a fragmented world living in virtually and actually different realities.

How?

World War II can tell us the answer.

SpaceX Launches Starlink Mission from Florida

In the early 1940s a tyrannical power using fake news, hate speech, military might and hegemonic power controlled most of Europe: the Nazis. They controlled public life, news and local economies. Resistance groups dotted the European mainland, with one lifeline for non-official communication from free countries: radio.

As such, radios were contraband and confiscated. One of the activities the allies undertook to support resistance fighters was shipping in radios for communication and outside news.

Today, radios arent at risk of being confiscated.

But the internet is.

And as a cloud-delivered service, hijacking the internet happens largely out of public sight, in servers and routers that enable services like Netflix and the BBC and Facebook and Google.

Its called splinternet, and its the ongoing division of a worldwide interconnected internet into separate and isolatable fiefdoms, each of which can be controlled and managed so that governing powers can control what their populations see.

SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The Great Firewall of China is the most well-known example, but Iran, Syria and Vietnam also control significant portions of the internet for their populations. Russia just completed technology to wall off its internal networks, servers and internet users from the wider internet. And India, in its attempt to control unrest following its anti-Muslim citizenship law, has employed a particularly heavy-handed approach: simply blocking the internet entirely.

(One unintended result: contractors in India cant reach their employers in the U.S.)

Another country, United Arab Emirates, took a different approach: outlawing all messengers except one that it built a digital backdoor into: Totok.

However it happens, it allows governments to control what people see, read and hear from outside sources and censor what their own people say.

Starlink can change all of that.

Elon Musk recently revealed details about how people will access StarLink. It will be incredibly simple, and it will enable access to the relatively free global internet from anywhere on the planet.

Starlink Terminal has motors to self-adjust optimal angle to view sky. Instructions are simply: plug in socket, point at sky. These instructions work in either order. No training required.

What that means is that anyone can access the internet from anywhere. Chinese citizens will be able to access Google and information about Tiananmen Square. Russian citizens will be able to see external analysis of Putins financial dealings if even Russia blocks outside sources. Indian protesters cant be cut off from the internet.

Of course, governments will make the Starlink Terminal illegal.

But that in itself will be a victory.

Censorship works best when it is invisible: when people dont even know that there is alternate information, other understandings of reality. (Chinese teenage exchange students at a relatives house last year, for example, had never heard of Tiananmen Square, and refused to believe stories that, they felt, painted China in a negative light.)

But when a device to connect to the outside world becomes contraband, the glass walls become opaque. People realize that walls have been erected to prevent them from seeing other opinions.

And that is at least one step to maintaining a free, open and accessible internet globally, which should help combat fake news, propaganda and information deprivation aimed at controlling populations.

Getty

And its a step towards making the splinternet harder to achieve.

1,000 satellites will be enough to enable basic service, Musk has said. SpaceX just launched a third batch of 60 satellites, and is expected to continue launching that many every two weeks through the rest of 2020.

(For context, only about9,000satellites have been launched in all of space history, about 5,000 of which are still in orbit. And only 2,000 are actually still operational. So even at a quarter or a fifth of total capacity, Starlink is a ridiculously large satellite constellation and unprecedented in human history and astronomers have legitimate concerns about light pollution.)

While Musk has applied for launch permission for up to 42,000 satellites, hes unlikely to launch them all.

But at the current pace, a global and unblockable internet service should be available in less than a year.

This doesnt mean that all will instantly be rosy.

Governments, of course, can try to jam satellite signals. Thats unlikely to work or even be possible in all places and all times, however. Theyre also likely to continue to try to engage in false flag and other misinformation projects. And people seem to be pretty good at fooling themselves these days: locking themselves in reality bubbles that block dissenting narratives.

But any gaps in the emerging splinternet are opportunities for different perspectives and, hopefully, true facts to emerge.

Updated January 10: the story stated that SpaceX launches would be every 2-3 months; the company has actually said they will be every two weeks (with a few disclaimers).

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How Elon Musk Became Elon Musk: Elon Musk’s Early Years

Posted: at 4:19 pm

Visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal (PYPL), Tesla Motors (TSLA), and SolarCity (SCTY),and is the founder of SpaceX. His astounding success has given rise to comparisons of Musk andSteve Jobs, Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, and Bill Gates. Amid an often difficult childhood, Musk developed a relentless work ethic (he is known to work as many as 80 to 100 hours per week) and a tenacious single-minded vision.

On September 7, 2018 Musk appeared to be smoking marijuana while interviewing for a podcast. Coupled with the exit of Tesla's head of human resources and chief accounting officer, that news saw the stock drop in trade. This was just another addition to the string of bad news for the company, including a shareholder lawsuit against Musk and the company for his infamous tweet on August 7.Musk had tweetedthat he is considering taking Tesla private. The company later decided against the move.

We look at the early life and education of the man behind a string of companies that have disrupted multiple industries.

Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971in Pretoria, one of South Africa's three capital cities. His father was an engineer and his mother was a model and nutritionist. He is the oldest of three children in an ambitious family. His brother Kimbal Musk is currently a venture capitalist and environmentalist. His sister Tosca Musk is an award-winning producer and director.

After his parents divorced when he was a child, Musk lived mostly with his father. Musk started school a year early, attending the private Waterkloof House Preparatory School and later graduating from Pretoria Boys High School. He read voraciously and was also an avid fan of comics. Self-described as a bookworm and something of a smart aleck, he was bullied in school and withdrew to his books at the expense of his social life.

At the age of 10, Musk was introduced to computers with the Commodore VIC-20. He quickly learned how to program and at the age of 12 sold a game called Blastar to Spectravideo for $500.

In one telling incident at that time, Musk, along with his brother, planned to open a video game arcade near their school. Ultimately, their parents nixed the plan. But apparently the only thing stopping them was the need for a city permit which had to be applied for by an adult.

Musks intellectual aptitude did him few favors as a child. He found few friends in the tough-minded Afrikaner culture he encountered in school.

"I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don't face enough adversity," he would later say in an interview.

Musk attended the English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School, and later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. The years were lonely and brutal, from his descriptions.

They got my best friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that hurt, Musk said. For some reason they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. Thats what made growing up difficult. For a number of years there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the (expletive) out of me, and then Id come home, and it would just be awful there as well.

If there was a point of bright escape for Musk; it was technology. When he was only 10, he became acquainted with programming via the Commodore VIC-20, an inexpensive home computer. Before long, he had become proficient enough to create Blastar a video game in the style of Space-Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for $500.

At 17, Musk moved to Canada to avoid serving in the South African military, whose main duty in the late 1980s was enforcing apartheid. He would later obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother.

After emigrating to Canada, Muskenrolled inQueen's University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have five sons together, twins and triplets, before divorcing in 2008.

After two years at Queen's University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasnt all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.

Musk graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from theWharton School. The two majors speak to the direction Musks career would take later, but it was physics that made the deepest impression on his thinking.

(Physics is) a good framework for thinking, hed later say. Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a PhD in applied physics at Stanford University. With the internet exploding and Silicon Valley booming, Musk had entrepreneurial visions dancing in his head. He left the PhD program after just two days.

In 1995, with $28,000 and his younger brother Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides. The company got bought out, and Musk used his Zip2buyout money to create X.com, which he intended to shape into the future of banking. X was merged with a company called Confinity and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal. Musk was then ousted from the company before it wasbought by eBay.

After PayPal slipped away, Musk helped generate funding for an electric car startupcalled Tesla. You probably know the rest.

His early interest in reading philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy novels is reflected in his sense of idealism and concern with human progress. He aims to work in the areas he has identified as crucial to our future, specifically the Internet, the transition to renewable energy sources, and space colonization. With his work with PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and SpaceX, he has defied critics and made advances in all three of these frontiers. (See also4 Real-Life Tony Starks.)

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How Elon Musk Became Elon Musk: Elon Musk's Early Years

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Coronavirus has Elon Musk acting like just another used car salesman – The Guardian

Posted: at 4:19 pm

What has happened to Elon Musk?

A highlight reel of the billionaire Tesla CEOs activities since early March includes his pooh-poohing the coronavirus panic as dumb; keeping his northern California factory open in defiance of local public health orders; falsely asserting that children are essentially immune from the virus; providing a giant platform to promoters of an unproven and potentially dangerous treatment; predicting (inaccurately) that the US would have no new cases of Covid-19 by the end of April; attempting to re-open the factory before the end of the local shelter-in-place order; and calling shelter-in-place orders fascist. (Lets not even get into the drama over whether the BiPap machines he donated to some hospitals count as ventilators.)

Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences

Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences. He has more than 33m followers on Twitter and a fan base that tends to exalt him as a cross between Tony Stark and God. A recent study published as a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine linked his tweet about chloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that was subsequently touted as a potential Covid-19 treatment by Donald Trump, to a dramatic surge in online demand for the prescription medication. They werent aware of it, they werent interested in it they were trying to buy it, John Ayers, a UC San Diego professor of medicine and one of the studys authors, told the Guardian in an interview.

The chloroquine document that Musk shared was an example of what the infectious disease expert Carl Bergstrom has described as quantitative bullshit the use of statistics and data to persuade someone by overwhelming and intimidating them, without any allegiance to truth or accuracy. Last week, Musk was apparently taken in by another pair of coronavirus bullshit artists, this time a pair of doctors from Bakersfield, California.

Drs Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi held a press conference to promote the idea that Covid-19 is much more widespread and much less deadly than what ivory tower figures such as Dr Anthony Fauci have said. Docs make good points, Musk tweeted, with a link to a YouTube video of the 50-minute press conference. (YouTube removed the video for spreading misinformation, but not before it received millions of views; one of the doctors has gone on to make appearances on Fox News.)

The docs did not make good points. After opening his remarks by defining science like a high schooler writing a term paper (What is science? Essentially, its the study of the natural world through experiment, through observation, so thats what were doing) Erickson presented testing data from the chain of urgent care clinics they own. The clinics have performed 5,213 Covid-19 tests and had 340 positive results, which they claimed means that there is a 6.5% rate of infection in the local population. The pair performed the same math (positive tests divided by total tests) on the statewide numbers of 33,865 positive tests out of 280,900 total, to arrive at a 12% infection rate for the state. From there, they calculated that California has had a total of 4.7m infections and calculated that the death rate for people who contract Covid-19 in California is just 0.03% much lower than that of the seasonal flu.

None of this stands up to scrutiny. In order to assume that the rate of infection amongst a small number of people can apply to the entire population, you have to use a random and representative sample. But the people who are getting tested at urgent care clinics in California are neither random nor representative; they are people with severe symptoms or who are performing certain essential jobs. Figuring out the actual infection rate across the broader population will require careful sampling that avoids this selection bias.

The Bakersfield duo used their meaningless numbers to argue that shelter-in-place orders must be lifted a position that Musk clearly also holds. (In an extraordinary joint statement, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine jointly and emphatically condemn[ed] the pair, and suggested they were releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the publics health.)

The issue is not that Musk has staked out a contrarian stance on the coronavirus. There are difficult debates that need to be had over how and when to restart the economy in order to minimize long term economic harms and maximize public health. We can and should have that discussion, and we should do it without impugning the moral character of everyone who argues for a faster loosening of restrictions.

But its increasingly difficult to take Musk seriously when he makes his argument by cherry-picking numbers or relying on blatant misuse of data. Please, make your case, but make it using real facts, and not by playing fast and loose with numbers in an effort to mislead the public about what is actually happening. Otherwise you look and sound a lot less like the brilliant engineer and entrepreneur, and a lot more like just another used car salesman.

Excerpt from:

Coronavirus has Elon Musk acting like just another used car salesman - The Guardian

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