I’ll take the trillionaire creating thousands of millionaires over the millionaires creating trillions in debt.

Can we debunk this nonsense? Elon Musk was awarded (note: not given) cost-per-result contracts to perform a service for the US government. The total of those for SpaceX specifically is ~$22B, which includes repaid loans, state tax incentives, etc. The deal was simple: put stuff into LEO at or below a set cost. If SpaceX does it below the set cost, SpaceX keeps the difference. If it doesn’t, the company is responsible for the overrun. End result? SpaceX & Elon lowered the cost of getting 1 kg into LEO by 95-97% vs what NASA was paying previously. And for the record, every other company around at the time was offered the same opportunity to bid on the contract - Musk/SpaceX just took it. The handout narrative implies the taxpayer is the patron and SpaceX the dependent. The cost data shows the opposite: before SpaceX, NASA paid Russia’s Soyuz $80-86M per seat; SpaceX delivered at ~$55 million. SpaceX saved the US taxpayer $300M-$465M each year on that alone (the US sends 12-15 astronauts to space each year) On the lunar lander, NASA estimated SpaceX’s fixed-price bid saved $20B-$30B vs the Boeing-preferred cost-plus approach. So: SpaceX saved the US taxpayer more than the total value of contracts it earned on a single project, PLUS provided the US government with the requested services (put stuff in LEO) at the best possible price.

Elon could literally solve homelessness tomorrow. All he needs to do is sell his stake in the companies he created from the ground up, crashing the price and evaporating his wealth as well as the savings and pensions of workers globally.. handing the control of these companies over to short term profit interests and preventing any long term vision from being enacted.. THEN take whatever money that remains which will be nowhere near 1tn and give it to homeless charities who have never solved homelessness anywhere on earth because they’re financially incentivised to do the opposite. Bam - homelessness solved. The reason he doesn’t do any of this is because he’s evil.

Cute theory, let's play it out. A monkey hoards a trillion bananas. The troop, enraged, beats him to death. They gather around the pile to feast at last. But... oh wait, there is no pile. It turns out the "bananas" were shares in a banana-launching company the dead monkey founded. The shares were worth a trillion because he was alive to run it. Now he is dead and the stock is worth $0. The retarded monkeys have clubbed their way into a recession. But it gets worse. Half the "bananas" were tied up in a rocket that supplies bananas to monkeys on the far mountain who had no bananas at all. Another chunk was tied up in a little satellite dish that beamed banana coordinates to the troop after a flood took out their trees. So now they realized they beat to death the only monkey who knew how the dish worked. So the monkeys sit there. No bananas. No rockets. No coordinates to get more banananas. Just a dead body and a powerful sense of fairness as they all now became infinitely poorer. OH And somewhere a smaller monkey watches the whole thing and quietly decides he will never build anything in front of these animals again.

The left won. The world's richest man is an electric vehicle manufacturer who is decarbonising the atmosphere while helping quadriplegics, restoring space travel, and making the internet and freedom of speech widely available across the globe. Unfortunately most of the people who identified as "left" were simply pathological grief merchants with oppositional defiance disorder. They build nothing. They stand for nothing.

The cure for bad speech is more speech. The cure for bad ideas is better ideas. The cure for both is never to put a politician in charge of which is which.

Can we stop being surprised when we found out everyone who worked on movie was underpaid when the budget was 750k

What an absolute legend.

Justice and sustainable assets… According to who!?

Why wouldn’t I just write “Deleted at {current_time}” to the event log?

They’re just *usually* hilariously bad and out of touch even with scientific studies. For instance, IIRC childless men are most likely to believe that “nurture” matters more that “nature”, while women with multiple kids know better.

Sequel trilogy could’ve been awesome if Disney didn’t panic over online blowback and let Reddit write Rise of Skywalker. Force Awakens and Last Jedi were both awesome in different ways. Empire Strikes Back got massive blowback when it released. It’s viewed as the GOAT now.

The stork

Counterpoint

There’s not a human being on this planet you can hire for any amount of money that enhances my productivity more than my $20/mo claude bill…

Vibe-coded stuff is fine for personal mini-apps and internal tools though because the only people you can disappoint is yourself and your coworkers who aren't paying you anyway

This is the America I want to live in.

Whenever there’s a question of “Why is ____ so expensive???” The answer is almost always a collection of regulations you had no idea exist

I can’t stop thinking about what a remarkable thing this is to admit after 60 straight years of “fuck the man, change the world” boomer activism

The DoorDash discourse is a great illustration of how powerful and pervasive motivated reasoning is. Instead of just acknowledging that people like the convenience, a lot of commentators insist on rationalizing it as somehow cost effective or a symptom of “late state capitalism.”