… he could also have listed Richard Daystrom and Eldon Tyrell 
5 Likes
Intelligence is our birthright, and with it we can solve any challenge! Except regulating markets, Hayek made up some reasons that is hard and humanity can never do it. Besides, we won’t need to once we figure out fusion devices to give us unlimited energy with no waste heat, which is just easy nuclear physics. Remember, humans can do anything. Else.
7 Likes
Yes.1) We’ve been through this maybe five or six years ago; the question then was “who is this Elon Musk guy and why should we care”, and look where we are now.
Little boys with deadly toys and far too much influence.
ETA:
1) In this context - Not someone (Marc “Netscape” Andreessen), but something. Andreessen Horowitz, the company. Slightly less evil than anything Peter Thiel is involved in.
3 Likes
Andreessen’s big claim to fame was Netscape™
His fifteen minutes were over long ago
4 Likes
He’s not in it for the fame, obviously.
Ignore billionaire techbros who think they know how the world should be run at your own peril.
4 Likes
“Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.”
I think the expression with sharks is “swim or die”. “Grow or die” is the philosophy of the cancer cell.
11 Likes
Also, these people need to look around. While the Earth isn’t a mathematically closed system, ain’t no one getting out of this gravity well, no matter how many billions of dollars they throw at a penis rocket. In the long (or increasingly, near) term, “Grow or die” is a losing strategy for every organism stranded on this ball of rock.
12 Likes
The manifesto says that we should increase everyone’s energy by 1000x. Right now humans use more than 15 TW on a planet that receives 44000 TW from the sun. Even without greenhouse emissions or any other side effects, it is literally not possible to raise that a thousand times without increasing temperatures by dozens of degrees, because energy is conserved.
Think that means they’re envisioning that humanity will have spread to other stars with that energy, or think that means they’re too stupid to have considered there might be any physical consequences of growth that we can’t magic away? I know my guess.
9 Likes
Not with that attitude, young man!
4 Likes
9 Likes
Boeing gives busy billionaires unbothered about bespoke beds a cheaper BizJet
You know how it goes: you want a private jet, but all the fuss and bother of deciding how to furnish it is just so off-putting. We here at Vulture Central completely sympathize.
Boeing has come to the rescue! The plane-maker has created pre-designed cabin layouts and configurations “to expedite installation, while lowering the total purchase price of the airplane.”
The layouts fit inside the BBJ 737-7 – the version of the twin-engine craft that Boeing offers as a business jet.
[…]
1 Like
NCSA Mosaic. I think he did that more or less on his own. He was part of the startup that spun that work out to Netscape. I just encountered one of the others on fediverse the other day and they don’t seem to be an arsehole.
Netscape was part of me beginning to learn that you can be right about something but fundamentally wrong because the rich have it rigged. I couldn’t believe it had an over billion dollar IPO because they had no fucking revenue let alone profit. I didn’t realise it didn’t matter because they had enough suckers. Andreesen and the money class glide over that shit either consciously knowing it or just let hegemony fill in the gaps for them. If they pay it, it’s worth it, the market isn’t wrong. I was in my early 20s and had no money at all which is how I managed to avoid getting rich!
4 Likes
I do hope it includes all the Max features…
4 Likes
10 Likes
Atlas Farted
(By that famously smug, arrogant author, My Brand.)
You’d think these galaxy-eyed “optimsts” would realize how much their beloved “ever-expanding growth” resembles a defining feature of cancer.
Great body slam, thanks for the link.
5 Likes
For folks who wonder about the perspective of some billionaires, I highly recommend this series. Below is a link to a very short, non-spoilery video of a speech that sheds some light on that. Not sure how long it will be available, but the point it made about influence, spin, and greed…
8 Likes
Et tu, NPR? I mean, I know the restaffing and semi-recent replacement of its leadership with John Lansing were an overt pivot toward conservatism, but wow:
…
As the former $2.7m-a-year head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – one of the country’s most prominent conservative thinktanks – Brooks spent a decade sowing the despair he now insists he is here to cure.Brooks’ career turn from let-them-eat-cake ideologue to I-feel-your-pain happiness prophet may seem bizarre. But he is walking the well-trodden – and lucrative – path from arsonist to firefighter. It is a trail previously blazed by financial crisis-era deregulators now platformed as credible economic experts, and by Iraq war proponents reimagined as leaders of a pro-democracy resistance.
In Brooks’ case, he led an organization that repeatedly worked to help its billionaire and corporate donors prevent working-class Americans from securing the better standard of living, universal benefits and leisure time that undergird the countries consistently reporting the world’s highest levels of happiness.
Citing a colleague’s book deriding Americans as “takers”, Brooks insisted the central crisis facing the nation is not a notoriously thin social safety net – but politicians who “offer one government benefit after another to our citizens”, complaining that this “has made a majority of Americans into net beneficiaries of the welfare state”.
He declared war on “labor unions and state employees demanding that others pay for their early retirements, lifetime benefits, and lavish state pensions”. Under his leadership, the AEI railed against “entitlement” programs, tried to privatize and gut social security, opposed Medicaid expansion, opposed free college, opposed rent control and fought against free healthcare.
…
The man who enables and services the billionaire class is here to tell all us working stiffs that we have no one but ourselves to blame. Gosh. Who woulda thunk it.
Also: Shut up and pay your taxes, peasants! And work until you die.
2 Likes
I’ve long thought that as long as they’re wasting money on vehicles rather than using it to improve society, it would be much more interesting for a billionaire with obscene amounts of wealth to build a luxury airship rather than found yet another rocket company or build another megayacht. Looks like the guy from Google is finally doing that.
4 Likes
A Silicon Valley billionaire supervillain with a private airship, you say?
(“Look out, grandpa Bond! Christopher Walken is right behind you!”)
9 Likes
Zorin’s ride was just a medium-sized blimp, not a full airship in the vein of Charles Muntz.
Look how floppy-floppy it is, plus it’s not even full of hydrogen to give the movie a proper finale:
8 Likes
