Calling someone a pedo is not just trash talk, especially if the accuser is as powerful as Musk. It may ruin someone’s life or result in vigilantism.
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It’s apparently not legally considered defamatory - as some people have demonstrated in court.
So how could saying someone is terrible in bed be defamation if calling someone a pedo isn’t?
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Probably because person who said it is privileged enough or the law is unjust. I think that in Europe it it would be considered defamatory, but a person so privileged could probably get away with it anyway.
It isn’t, as you said it’s just trash talk, and IMO it’s good kind of trash talk when you’re punching up.
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By making divisions based on the organizations as a whole, rather than one person?
Or should I for example,judge the US as a whole based on the elected leadership?
Organizations, like countries, are made up of a lot of individuals, and in the case of an org like Neuralink, I’m sure full of individuals who really genuinely want to bring the promise of the technology to the masses, in the hopes that their years of hard work will make people’s lives better.
The same way in my year living in the US I have met countless people who want are caring, tolerant and labour every day to do good, regardless of what leadership of their state or country may say.
Cults of personality work both ways, and IMHO the promise of all of these people working hard to alter the trajectory of rocketry, energy, mobility and now disability have merit.
I believe those who assume no good can come of these initiatives because of one man are no different than those who believe good can ONLY become of these initiatives because of one man.
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No, I don’t think he’s contributed much. When someone is as anti-labor, anti-PEOPLE as Musk has shown himself to be, then I can’t believe he cares about anything other than the bottom line.
It’s also destroying one of the best programs that emerged out of the Cold war to boot. But as long as people can see Musk getting richer, who cares about the American space program, right?
It’s like people never read any of the like… millions of sci-fi books about the problems of the privatization of space travel…
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Hostile takeover?
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I’m not hearing anyone say that no good can come out of this work because Musk is an arrogant ass. The problems are that he’s trying to take credit and control of research that he doesn’t deserve credit for and should not control, and that he is actively misrepresenting the science and what these devices will be capable of. Plenty of good will come from BMI research, including by Neuralink, and he is skilled at raising interest and money. That money and energy would be much better invested, however, in research led and controlled by people with a better understanding of the science and with less selfish goals.
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Elon Musk does very little to separate himself from the corporations that he funds. He makes a show of being a part of them and their decisions. I don’t think it’s a good idea for people to mentally separate the work his corporations do from him, and he makes that impossible in the first place.
Elon Musk’s ideas for urban transportation clash with the realities of what we actually need (his insistence on pushing for even more private vehicle ownership over more efficient public transportation), but the money and resources that he commands lends him a residue of legitimacy. Heaven help us if any city actually listens to him in that regard. He whined like a manchild when the California county where the Tesla factory is located was staying locked down to protect its citizens due to COVID-19, and called it fascism. He decided to open up a new factory in Texas in what I understand is partial retaliation for California, which sounds good at first in regards to “Oh, more Teslas, that’s nice!”, but then you have to remember that Musk hates unions, and Texas’ is a state where unions have very little power. Tesla treats its employees like garbage, and lies to them.
Musk is also a fraud with regards to Tesla in that he just poured enough of his cash from helping create PayPal into Tesla to the point where he was able to squeeze himself in as one of the founders and takes credit for it all when he did jack shit. He’s a churlish and dangerous troll on Twitter who spread COVID-19 misinformation and called public transportation advocates and critics of his urban transportation plans “Subway Stalinists”. He treated the recent coup in Bolivia (where lithium, a core component of electric car batteries, is a big resource) as a joke.
Thanks to Elon’s vast wealth and power, he was able to get away with falsely accusing someone of being a pedophile and suffered zero consequences for it. He and the the other space corporations are well on their way to completely looting and privatizing NASA. And I already mentioned how his plan for people to get up to space is to basically bring back indentured servitude.
The world doesn’t need people such as him helming multi-billion-dollar corporations. Or people like him in general. Musk, Bezos, & Branson are part of the generation that are currently fucking up the present, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be done any time soon.
The persons and their corporations are joined at the hip. You can say that the efforts of thousands of very smart people who are working their asses off is because they want to make society better, but the people they’re working under are uber-rich oligarchs who only care about themselves and others like them; if/when any of the benefits of the tech that’s being worked on manage to trickle down to regular people, I feel like it’ll be too little, too late.
People who refuse to support Facebook aren’t being told to separate Zuckerberg’s lies and power-plays words and actions from his corporation’s work, which isn’t good in the first place since their work is to make Facebook and everything it owns the only places that people visit online, under the guise of “We just want to connect the world”. Why should I separate the words and actions of Musk from his companies?
There’s also the problem with how this perpetuates the myth that you need an asshole in charge to get things done. You talk about how younger/future generations need to be inspired? Seeing Elon’s behavior constantly rewarded and him suffering zero consequences sets a terrible precedent, and gives kids who want to go into tech and science fields a shitty role model.
In conclusion, I think that we can do better than Musk and the companies he, Bezos, & Branson own. There are other places that we can look at for inspiration and hope for the future with regards to tech and science, and we need to look at those places rather than giving bloviating and immoral jackasses like Musk our time, taxpayer money, and attention.
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I disagree. It’s certainly not impossible. I love what SpaceX does because they’re reinvigorated interest in space, forced a very stagnant sector to rethink it’s wastefulness, and after watching the recent launch to the ISS, my niece was ALL about the “fancy new spaceship” and “modern space stuff” it represents. Musk barely appeared on those telecasts, but a lot of smart folks did, and they were a blast to watch.
“Impossible”, indeed.
From the 8 paragraphs outlining musk’s failings though, I can infer that this isn’t easy for you, which I accept, and I accept it isn’t easy for others. I do suggest that focusing so much on one person in this organizations is not productive. You spent 9 paragraphs explaining to me how bad a person Musk is, in reply to my post about how much good his ventures are capable of doing. You don’t see the obvious disconnect there?
There’s a lot of hyperbole and virtriol in your statements (“looting” NASA even though they get less from NASA than every other company that bids, righteous indignation at what you perceive as undeserved status and appropriation of ideas), but IMHO, you’re making my point for me. To me, it appears your hatred for the man has, in your mind, made the efforts of everyone else working for these organizations irrelevant - you simultaneously say that the myth is perpetuated that one man needs to be in charge, yet you yourself seem unable, based on these comments, to look beyond this one man and consider the organizations he supports separately from that one man.
As I said, cults of personality work both ways, and As much as adoration of one person can cause someone to vote (or not vote) for an entire platform of ideas, clearly in this case it can also do the opposite - hatred of one person is capable of making the body of effort put in by thousands be decalred wholly worthless by some.
Polarising, extremist viewpoints are dangerous for this very reason, as is hyperbole. I beleve these ventures are an imperfect but net good for the sectors they find themselves in. I can do this without caring one whit what Musk posts on Twitter, just as I can care about the US without having to focus on what the current leader of this country posts there as well. I understand and accept this is not a universal position and some people are quite prepared to throw the whole thing out (on both sides) because the options aren’t perfect. I am not one of these people, but I respect the rights of others to disagree. That is, after all, the point of this place.
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Its really disturbing how much 1980s/1990s dystopian cyberpunk looks like our world today.
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Musk’s failings, decisions, and immoral behavior affect much more than just himself. They affect his workers at Tesla. They have the potential to affect the future development of urban centers. They affect the valuation of his companies. I’m not sure how you can ignore how Musk’s “funding secured” tweets which violated SEC rules could’ve affected “how much good his ventures are capable of doing.” I think that focusing on one person in these organizations, the one who calls a ton of the shots, is indeed productive.
You can feel free to love what SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink do. But when it comes to “how much good his ventures are capable of doing”, it should be fair game and not considered polarizing and extremist to question the motives and who they’re doing it for. Like I said in my prior comment, I don’t believe that the benefits of the tech that’s being worked on with Musk & others like him at the helm will manage to trickle down to those who need it most, and if they do, it’ll be too little, too late.
I don’t think that it’s hyperbole and vitriol to point out how little Elon cares about his workers, how he spread false information about COVID-19, jokes about coups that wind up benefitting him, and how his proposals for space travel for the common man include a reinvented indentured servitude under a different name. When I talked about looting and privatizing NASA, I pointed out that it wasn’t just his company, but other space corporations as well.
My thoughts and opinions on this issue are driven more or less by sentiments similar to what Scientist said,
Not just for technology similar to Neuralink, but also space travel, transportation, and whatever else Musk and people like him have their fingers in.
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Is it just me or is Elon Musk beginning to remind anyone of Dr. Smith from the old Lost in Space TV show?
Remember that Dr. Smith wasn’t a real doctor, that was a nickname given to him by a mining company after he invented a drug which caused the miners to work 24 hours a day without noticing.
That’s Musk’s goal here I’m afraid. He wants to stick a wire in everyone’s head so we won’t notice that him and his friends don’t pay their taxes.
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Sounds interest but overpromising and I wonder how much neurology he knows.
My wife was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) 14 years ago. So I’ve been spending the past 14 years trying to understand dementia. There is so much we don’t know. And there are many different types of dementias with different underlying mechanisms. I do not believe that this magic chip is going to cure it despite Musk’s claims.
SpaceX is probably successful because he is not the CEO and not involved in the day-to-day operations. Tesla still exists only due to government subsidiaries and shows a poor understanding of how to mass produce cars. The poor worker safety, the decision to buy the Fremont plant (which Toyata gave up on), the amount of time it takes to get a replacement windshield for a Tesla, show that executing is not his strong point.
It is interesting what the chip currently does with a pig. It is a huge jump from that to human medicine. Hint: most promising medications prove to be failures.
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But does he see himself more as Dr. Smith, or as Jonas Venture?
Because apparently, some thought they were how tos instead of cautionary tales…
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I only read the headline. Now I have bacon chips on the brain. Does that count?
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It appears that some people find this easier that others. Just like some people can’t enjoy Michael Jackson’s music anymore.
Maybe if we focused more on not fucking up our planet, we’d be less pressed to go to space in the first place? I can see the appeal of space for scientists and for explorers, but I’m afraid we’d be just the same dickheads in space that we are here on earth.
But isn’t the last thing this planet needs more tourists burning fossil fuel. And however you power those rockets, that will be the case exactly until all energy production on the planet will be sustainable. You might wish to go to space, but we just can’t afford it.
One might say that billionaire-founded corporations mostly help us dig deeper into the hole we’re in.
Or we could, as a society, spend less time doing shit jobs that only exist for shovelling money into the pockets of billionaires, and spend the free time driving around elderly people, and/or visiting them at their home. This is something we could do right now, without a single chip in a single pig.
I think the verdict is still out whether or not an electric vehicle fleet is a good idea, and where should all that Lithium come from? At the very least it would lead to people driving even more miles, and currently electric cars are still running on fossil fuel. Autonomous driving, by the way, will also lead to a massive increase in miles driven.
A good idea, instead, is to increase the average number of passengers in a vehicle, and the number of miles traveled for work. Maybe the billionaires can be persuaded to focus their time more in that area?
As long as these thousands of very smart people rely on billionaires to inspire them, we’re well and truly fucked. Because it’s very rare that billionaires are ever interested in making life better for the average person.
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You’re never going to get exploration out of the human spirit. Some people want to know what’s out there, or take on new challenges, including making life interplanetary. That’s no more a bad idea than art, sports, or recreation are, and has real benefits, too - since a lot of the technologies needed to live on those (much shittier) worlds will help life back here, too. This is a rehash of the 50-year-old "what has nasa done for us lately’’ trope, where provably thousands of innovations came out of the space race.
Many of the technologies involved in these endeavours involve creating energy without fossil fuels (the stated goal of Tesla, after all, is removing energy dependence on fossil fuels), and alternative ways to create water, clean air, and remove pollution from the atmosphere. IMHO the net benefit of this research (and interesting entire new generations in exploration, science, research, and discovery) far outweighs the negative. As I said though, and as you stated, not everyone feels the same, and YMMV on what is or isn’t important to you.
I will continue to encourage my nieces and nephews to be interested in science, space, and exploration, and it just so happens many of these corporations are a big part of why they are interested in the first place. Again, YMMV.
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They don’t, or at least not all of them do.]If you’ve got the cash there are a few mining equipment companies who will sell you one, with or without support services. But the tunnels and associated loop garbage are perfect examples of why people give Musk a hard time. He spent two years hyping a revolutionary project that would change transportation and built a tunnel unsuitable for stated purpose using conventional equipment, but yeah it cost less. The Hawthorne test tunnel was smaller than the height of the standard Breda subway cars used in the LA subway and had no ventilation shafts or stations. He cut costs by not doing the job he’s comparing it to. The presentation looked great, but failed at being useful. With something like brain implants, finding out that it doesn’t meet design needs after it is in place isn’t an acceptable risk.
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