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X's Moonshot for Circularity
- bearjaws 2y agoFor those as confused as I was, this is not another one of Elon's X companies. Appears to be funded by Alphabet.
- mintplant 2y agoAlphabet's X has been around for quite a while, too. I don't know how they let him get away with that, unless "X" is perhaps too generic to trademark.
- a1o 2y agoWasn't it named as Moonshot Factory? I get a sense that at some point it was part of Google itself.
- fooker 2y agoGetting separated from Google is what effectively killed it. At Google, these efforts had unlimited funding without much oversight. At Alphabet, it's basically like running a VC funded startup.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago>I don't know how they let him get away with that, Because Elon's X.com predates Alphabet's X by 16 years...
- tobr 2y agoThe domain name? Or a trademark?
- efdee 2y agoX.com was a bank funded by (amongst others) Musk in 1999. They later merged with Confinity to found PayPal.
- echoangle 2y agoOk, but don’t you lose the trademark if you don’t actively use it?
- colejohnson66 2y agoNot necessarily. It's generally a challenge that causes you to lose it. But 'X' is so generic, it's arguable that it might not even be eligible for trademark protection.
- 015a 2y agoOwning the domain name isn't a singularly valid way to assert trademark control; it has to be used. Elon had an "X" company way back when, but it became Paypal; they didn't really use the X name in a public fashion for very long at all. The reason is probably more-so that Google's "X" isn't apparently a legal entity; its a division within Google. So, it doesn't have consumer sentiment around it, its not a product name they're selling, its not a registered entity, etc. In other words: "Skunkworks" as a term originated from a division at Lockheed, now its a term many companies use, oftentimes in legal & public ways, but Lockheed really doesn't have grounds to stop them from doing so.
- pridkett 2y agoFunny you should pick “Skunkworks”. The way that Lockheed Martin uses it, “Skunk Works”, is trademarked and all rights reserved. Even when Lockheed talks about it on their website[0] they put the all rights reserved symbol by it. They go to court to try and protect it - as was the case in Australia, which they lost. [0] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-areas/aeronautics/skunkworks.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-are...
- 015a 2y agoFair! I hadn't known they'd trademarked it and at least tried to enforce it.
- SoftTalker 2y agoI idly wondered if Google owned the "alphabet" of .company names: a.company, b.company, etc. But it appears not.
- rsynnott 2y agoIt almost certainly is.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoWho will stop Elon Musk? Google? Haha.. That is laughable. Musk is bigger than anything America has ever seen.
- tarsinge 2y agoA stock market crash? Much of his wealth and (pre-government) career is about stock pumping.
- bob1029 2y ago> x.com > x.company > X, a division of Google LLC. All rights reserved. Took me a solid 90 seconds.
- red_hare 2y agoMy hint was that the about page linked to their "Twitter"
- drcongo 2y agoThat and the fact that the logo isn't the least effort Fivr job ever.
- rsynnott 2y agoIt is a _much_ better logo, which is perhaps surprising given that it's a skunkworks rather than a major social media network. Possibly Musk just fired all Twitter's designers before getting around to the rebrand.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoNew google moonshot to do "molecular recycling", but their first pilots are for using ML and sensors to better sort waste streams. This is useful tech, but the solution to most waste is to burn it for power with great emission controls.
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoIf we're eventually going to close the carbon cycle, it would be extremely stupid to go e.g. polyethylene -> CO2 capture from flue gas -> ethylene synthesis with H2 -> polyethylene. Sorting out the plastic and doing stuff like anaerobic thermochemical conversion is way more efficient. No need to get the oxygen involved.
- xnx 2y agoIs pyrolysis a good option?
- calmbonsai 2y agoWe already have companies using ML for recycling https://ampsortation.com/en-us https://ampsortation.com/en-us and this includes real-time plastics identification, but they don't do it to the classification level this Google subsidiary claims. Burning isn't viable atm for many waste streams due to costs, but eventually we'll be forced into it. Long before then, we'll have an i18n set of industry standards and enforcement mandating the equivalent of a UV-barcode that precisely identifies all plastics. This tech is merely a stop-gap, but a necessary one.
- ameliaquining 2y agoNote for anyone who was initially confused, as I was: This is the Alphabet subsidiary that does blue-sky R&D, not the company formerly known as Twitter.
- bakje 2y agoAnd to be clear, by bluesky R&D you’re not referring to Bluesky, the Twitter/X alternative, are you?
- rsynnott 2y agoBluesky is itself presumably called that because it was _Twitter's_ skunkworks project back in the day. Also, fun fact: the Bluesky CEO's name means "blue sky" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Graber#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Graber#Early_life), _but_ she was only hired as CEO a couple years after the project started, so it definitely wasn't named after her. That's some serious nominative determinism; it's a close second on this one: https://news.sky.com/story/shoe-zone-announces-terry-boot-as-next-finance-boss-replacing-peter-foot-12240119 https://news.sky.com/story/shoe-zone-announces-terry-boot-as...
- syntaxing 2y ago(Formerly Google X) X has been a thing since 2010…it’s where Waymo started before “graduating”.
- xnx 2y agoNot to be confused with Google X, the short-lived Google Labs experimental UI clone of the OS X dock https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Google_X https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Google_X
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- leoh 2y agoWhat a joke
- betimsl 2y agoThese are the experts that make money disappear.