There’s a bunch of stuff he’s said that struck me at the time as being lifted from the Mars Trilogy, but I couldn’t give direct quotes right now. There’s a Discovery Channel show called Mars who’s first series was half drama about settling the planet and half documentary about the early efforts towards colonisation and of course he’s all over it and I feel like that was a place he recycled a lot of Robinson’s technical ideas at least
I had a coworkers trying to sell me Alex Jones (iodine) supplements, he’s got a captive consumer base and he’s still raking in the money from them. I don’t understand the supplement game, but it I think these marginal people worry ‘they won’t be as healthy/good/whole’ if they quit taking them, so they don’t and they send him $60 every 4 months or whatever to make sure.
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Wait, he endorsed The Culture? I don’t believe he’s read the books to understand the concept of the culture. I don’t think you can get it from any one book.
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“Since Musk’s takeover of X…” he didn’t takeover X. He took over Twitter. Stop trying to make X happen Grauniad.
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No doubt he’d see himself as a top dog of Special Circumstances, doing heavy messing whenever he liked, uploaded to a Ship Mind.
He doesn’t see that in the unlikely event he was allowed near SC, he’d probably be some limited purpose auxiliary, or uploaded to a knife-missile. See also: Use of Weapons.
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I’m currently reading A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith which forensically and relentlessly annihilates the idea of colonising Mars.
TL;DR: there’s no reason to do it, and it’d be mind-buggeringly difficult, dangerous and unethical to even try at our current level of technology.
Fortunately it’s available in hardback so someone can beat Musk to death with a copy.
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I’d read it but it’s a mind bogglingly stupid idea so a well researched book on the topic seems like overkill.
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I forgot to mention that it’s a very entertaining read too.
I think it’s useful to know in detail just why a mind bogglingly stupid idea is in fact, mind bogglingly stupid.
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Musk’s version of that was the cybertruck… and the dude does control a rocket company whose products - while they do tend to go off prematurely - are bigger than anyone else’s. All of which to say is, he may not be overcompensating well, but he couldn’t be overcompensating more.
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Absolutely not. Nope, nope, nope. She and Elon are two peas in a pod.
Yeah, a lot of the SpaceX gear uses ship names from the Culture.
How I wish that Banks was still alive so he could call Musk a twat… it’s like Chris Christie and Bruce Springsteen… your heroes think you suck. OTOH, I think the big hero on the science fiction side would be Neal Stephenson, and after reading Termination Shock and Fall (ugh) I’d guess Musk is aok by NS.
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He’s made enough Heinlein references that he must have, at some point, read “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” yet appears to have no idea he’s setting himself up for the same failure mode as Harrison in the story, only for Mars instead of the Moon. He’s getting too old, assuming he can still wing the finances, to go himself; he’s getting mired in lawsuits and politics and economic situations that make it increasing unlikely he’d be allowed to go to Mars, and if a Mars colonization effort happens, it is increasingly likely that he’d be specifically excluded from being a leader, considering he’s managed to tank one company almost completely and seems to be making inroads on the others he’s associated with. By the time there’s a Earth-Mars transporter capable of getting colony-level volumes of personnel and material on-site before the radiation cripples or kills them he’ll be in, what, his 70s, 80s? And that’s just one of the thousands of as-yet undeveloped and unavailable technologies required. By the time its all ready, if ever, he’ll be involved in a hundred child support lawsuits, dozens of shareholder lawsuits, and given his current trend many, many lawsuits in different countries for his business practices and labor-law violations. And all it takes is one judge to say, “You may not leave the planet, Mr. Musk, until this lawsuit is concluded to the satisfaction of the courts,” and he’s stuck here with the rest of us, probably forever.
In his case, though, I doubt he’ll find a couple of carnies willing to fix up their old barn-storming Falcon-42 and take off for Mars for a quixotic and ultimately fatal final trip.
I had thought his aquisition and destruction of Twitter was the billionaire mid-life crisis equivalent of buying an expensive sports car and crashing it on the way out of the dealership, but it’s pretty clear now its more equivalent to other rich assholes buying a newspaper and turning it into their personal propaganda tool in order to force their own personal views into the mainstream. One style point earned for picking a new medium, but negative ten billion for the actual content.
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*shrugz
This particular choir is comprised of the kind of people who will storm the US Capitol or torment the families of dead children or take up arms against people they believe to be Satanic child molesters if they get the marching orders from people like Jones.
Even if it’s an echo chamber, there is very real harm to be had if Jones’ voice is one of the ones echoing inside it.
Yes, unlike Vegas, what happens on xitter does not stay on xitter…
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… didn’t stop that guy in “Prometheus” 
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I hope everyone who has sued, is suing or will sue Jones, is now looking at how to add MuskX to the target.
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In 2023, when satire, irony and sarcasm have gone extinct, there’s a different reason to add a sarcasm tag to what we write: I personally would like people to be clear and confident about my position on genocide, authoritarianism, fascism and scum-fuckery like Alex Jones. The Onion and Wonkette are so destabilized and Looking-Glassed that at this point, everyone needs to make their real allegiances known in a way that can’t be mistaken. How disgusting that good people have to make extra effort to clarify their position when fascists are endlessly hiding behind weasel language to conceal their real, disgusting aims.
Sarcasm is so frail in the face of their anyway. Like “I care but not enough to take it seriously.”
I know that’s not how people always feel and it’s not how I feel when I am, on occasion, being sarcastic… I’m not accusing anyone with that. Usually what I feel at that point is bitter, hopeless, and alone.
Yet when adding to the large powerful chorus of voices saying “this is ok just accept it” ironically or not for the last two decades what does it achieve if we only grow more tolerant of people routinely murdering our children…
if it is unacceptable it should not be acceptable with a wink and a not to sarcasm.
So let sarcasm be fraught.
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