Seeing people doubt the technological genius and humanitarian nature of Elon Musk, but have you considered that earlier this year he launched the largest rocket ever off a flat slab, hurling chunks of concrete thousands of feet in every direction, destroying his launch site and a wildlife preserve?
https://blog.esghound.com/p/photos-from-the-spacex-debris-field
Considering what he's done for twitter, what is a meta for?
@toxtethogrady @MacrameOwl @maxkennerly
>Mine was "If you're so smart, you'd be published..."
This is still a grossly horrible take. There are billions smart people out there (statistically, half of all people). Most of them exist in impoverished societies, and will never get the opportunity to get out of poverty.
@toxtethogrady @MacrameOwl @maxkennerly
You miss my point entirely. Your statement of "if you're so smart, you'd be published" is predicating personal/intrinsic value on success achieved. That is the gross take.
A person can easily be smart, and make no "famous" contributions. Even in western society, many hundreds of millions of such people exist, as they aid their local fellow humans with their skill.
@kswenger @maxkennerly You will never get a good discussion out of it.
People descend almost immediately into science fantasy dreams of mining the asteroid belt and colonizing Mars. If you try to bring it back to the economics of doing this, you'll get abuse.
This is just another way that people simply ignore the sixth extinction. Our technological society will have collapsed long before we do any of these things, and it won't be for lack of asteroid mining.
@notsoloud SpaceX, like Tesla, grew layers of management whose sole job was to manage Elon's shitty ideas and keep him thinking he was in charge. Whether it was them who destroyed a *wildlife preserve* or Elon, any company who takes something irreplaceable from the commons with their stupidity should be cracked into a thousand pieces by regulators and the remains used to *try* to restore what they took.
The egotism of Musk isn't a sign of brilliance or humanitarianism.
Musk is just a guy with a reasonably good PR team whitewashing his reputation.
It's not a promotional strategy, it is propaganda.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/kanye-west-musk-trump-nazism/
It is a lie to enable future lying.
Bill Barr has oil oligarchs sanitizing his.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/elizabeth-koch-perception-box/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/04/what-spin-doctors-do/
https://theshiftnews.com/2020/06/07/whitewashing-reputations/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewashing_(censorship)
https://www.rd.com/list/examples-of-whitewashing/
https://mediadiversified.org/2015/02/27/whitewashing-a-reputation/
@maxkennerly
Besides the wildlife there also the human element. I remember reading how elon musk dimsnatled an entire neighbourhood in boca chica just so he can build his stupid space launcher.
People were already living there, some chose this as quiet place to live in their retirement, others lived there all their lives and had hopes of passing their homes to their kids.
He destroyed an entire community just like that.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/space-x-texas-village-boca-chica/606382/
Groups seek information on possible collusion between SpaceX and local officials, targeting of environmental activist, and federal licensing process August 8, 2022, Brownsville, TX – Local activists s
@maxkennerly Worse, SpaceX engineers were originally planning on a conventional flame trench and water cascade system (as is used for the much less powerful Falcon 9 pads at Cape Canaveral) but this was personally nixed by Musk because it would take longer to build and he decided it wasn’t necessary after communing with the spirit of his genius.
“There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.”
@maxkennerly But they got a 4/20 funny in. 🙃
I can only imagine:
EM: Let’s launch soon.
Team: But we haven’t finished building out the pad. Let’s wait until then.
EM: And miss a weed joke‽
@maxkennerly Don't forget that everyone told him this would happen, and he simply didn't care.
Few public figures are so contemptible as Elongated Muskrat.
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