Shit, not Denmark too? I’m used to you lot moping around the battlements of Elsinore; but, other than that, you seemed okay.
I know.
The alone part was by choice. The penniless part is because he had morals and ethics.
I really don’t think he’s an admirable person.
Edison was a complete and utter asshole, though. He executed elephants, and fucked over the people who did the real work in his company, and he took all the credit. Maybe you’re comparision is apt…
For one, he actually did care about science and what it could do for humanity, rather than his bottom line and he got fucked over for that. Maybe the lesson is that our society is not very humane and we should try to make it into something better…
Of course this is not to say that Nikola Tesla was “perfect” by any means; he also had his issues when it came to women and ‘minorities’, IIRC.
He was just a much better inventor and a better person in general than Edison was.
Again, low bar.
There’s a cheekily-named EV company in South Korea.
“You’ll never get to retire” assumes that the current system where a larger next generation must fund the retirement of the smaller current generation is an immutable system. There are any number of fixes or recreating a retirement/pension system that could address this. All would require the wealthy and companies to share a little more for the benefit of society.
As for population growth in the global south, even that is slowing down. Increased income and better health outcomes tend to result in lower birth and fertility rates, rather than greater, as fewer babies and children die, and care givers want to invest more resources in their children’s future success.
Kids are a joy, but they are also very expensive in time and resources. As someone already noted, if people like Musk or RWNJs want more babies, they need to build a system that incentivized having more babies, whether that is free medical care, free preschool, extended parental leave, etc. What is conspicuously forgotten in all right wing fantasies of turning women in axlotl tanks is that quite a few men also don’t want lots of kids. Maybe they’ll outlaw vasectomies once they’ve finished with birth control. (I wish I could add “/s” to this statement.)
The way things are measured, yes. Forbes has a real time list of the world’s most selfish people, although they don’t call it that, and he is currently right at the top.
I mean, all of that is basically measuring what other stock traders think they should be worth, which I think is kind of dubious at best. Like, everyone talks about things like the subprime mortgage crisis as a collapse, but all it really means is somebody actually figured out the things weren’t what they thought. When somebody discovers the Mona Lisa you bought is actually a photocopy, did they really just cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, or were you a sucker who never had that in the first place?
But, you know, that’s what our society allocates resources based on. Like we can have roads that badly need fixing and people who want to work on them, and it’s still somehow impossible, because everyone asks who will pay for it. So, you know, Musk and Bezos and so on have the biggest say in what America works on, which of course is only things that might make them more.
It’s all so exhausting. Civilization is at risk of crumbling because we have a few too many babies like the ones on the list I just mentioned. I don’t know why anyone should stick up for them.
Wow, you think congress can ever pass a constitutional ammendment ever again?
Civilization will crumble if we let people like Musk call the shots.
I’m not concerned with the mechanics of his assholery so much as him being one.
Buuuut the human population of Earth is already more than doubling with each generation.
In fact, the only group anywhere near dropping below replacement rates are white people, and…
Ohhhhh
Yup - white genocide is so much bollocks that I want to wax it.
I remember reading, many decades ago, that U.S. car companies made a big point of attracting young first-time car owners, because brand loyalty was so pervasive that they could bank on the vast majority continuing to buy that brand for life.
That’s what he really wants: not more people, but more new consumers for his products.
A demand for more consumers to help his already-meaningless dollar count go up even higher?
A concern about a problem that only exists if you think civilization means white people?
A reason to be proud of how many kids he’s been neglecting while he’s busy firing cars into space?
A chance to be a contrarian dick and get lauded as if he were an intellectual for it?
When they line up this well, why stick to one?
Yeah we know how it works. A man tweets some right wing fascist shit but leaves himself the wiggle room of “joking” so bros can gaslight people and be like “why so serious.” Already seen this shitty movie. Fuck all them.
Oh, I’m just anticipating TFG coming back into office and tearing up the Constitution so anything goes.
