Musk is always good for the 'hot take' that on the surface seems smart...but turns out it isn't, because he thinks that talking with an engineer in a specific area makes him qualified to talk like them. And then it turns out that he does the very thing he complains about.

For the latter, check this long list of acronyms used in Telsa vehicles (yes, A/C is obvious....keep scrolling down): https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/2024/en-...

What the fluff is a "Brick Monitor Board"? I'm a car nut and I know a lot about EVs, and my best guess: it's a submodule of the battery management system that monitors a group of cells, which I think the only reason I know to guess that is because I've watched youtube videos of tesla packs being repaired or torn down. IBST? Turns out that's the vacuum pump for the brake servo, and "I" means "electronic."

For the former, he was probably ranting about this because he's always struck me as a little insecure about being better than NASA (not really that hard) and thus is annoyed by NASA's fetish for backronyms...which I think it inherited from the military due to sleeping in the same bed for three quarters of a century, but also their convenience.

During all phases of a mission, there are often times where comms need to be fast (for example, when the flight director or whoever does it, asks each subsystem person if they're go for launch - there's a lot of those subsystem people and the "are you OK with us proceeding" happens multiple times just during the lead-up to launch. It's a lot faster to have the following conversation:

"ECS?" "Go." "TACNAZ?" "Go." "DONUT?" "Go."

If you're the astronaut, you don't want to be shouting "Electronic Cookie Stabilizer failure!" over the radio during an emergency, and anyone on the channel with you probably knows every acronym relating to the mission by heart..

YM "TDM TLA". HTH, HAND!