Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

I would give him credit for pushing past the catch-22 in electric cars that people would not buy them until the charging infrastructure was there and the infrastructure was not going to be built up until there were more electric cars.

He was able to make the upfront investment in the charging infrastructure to get EV momentum going (Even thought it was probably largely other people's money involved). Legacy car makers might never have been capable of reaching that point, being tied to different profitability timelines.

> Electric cars being heavier have an impact in that

In that moving a heavier weight takes more energy. We don't need to slightly reduce our energy consumption, we need to drastically reduce it. Meaning that in any country that did not make the same mistake as the US (being to build their society around individual cars), heavy EV are clearly not enough. We need to use public transports, (e-)bikes, and small EVs for those who don't really have a choice. As far as I understand, a Tesla is basically a sports car. There is no place for sports cars where we are going. Of course I understand it is harder for the US, both because of culture (SUVs are the norm, right?) and infrastructure.

Still it's never too late to start building better infrastructures, I suppose.

> Even when the electricity comes entirely from coal, electric vehicles are more efficient than ICE vehicles

What do you mean by "more efficient"? That a Tesla produces less CO2 using electricity made from coal than a small ICE vehicle? How in the world did you get to that conclusion?

> so every EV deployed reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

It's more complicated than that. If you throw away a recent, small ICE vehicle in order to deploy an EV, I am pretty sure it doesn't reduce much. You have to consider the entire life of the vehicle (and seriously, coal?).

> The number of launched would have to increase by 1000 times to start approaching the airline industry

Which is the goal of SpaceX and every other company going in the space business, right?

> it's possible to synthesize the fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere using carbon free energy, creating a closed loop.

At scale, I very much doubt it remotely adds up. And all the carbon free energy you use to do that, you don't use it to replace fossil fuels elsewhere. It just doesn't work.

> It doesn't work like that. You can't just say "let's build more public transport" and it will magically happen tomorrow.

Fair enough. On the one hand you need less companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and more public investment into transport infrastructure.

> As an added bonus, building up an EV production line allows you to relatively easily export them to other markets around the world. You can't export a rail line to another place.

That is an interesting, US-centered approach. First, all the countries that have good public transports should just not import Teslas. Because those countries don't depend that much on cars, they can just improve their public transport infrastructures.

Maybe the US could learn a bit from those countries when they look into their public transports ;-).

It baffles the mind how they continue to stumble with manufacturing while continuing to deliver innovative engineering at the same time.

I appreciate your callout, and recognize my callousness. However, I think I can clarify it somewhat.

This is a person who formed an early part of her internet identity as an "escaper from a cult". She wrote articles about her time in a cult, and how she didn't realize she was in it until she got out.

Then Musk bought twitter, fired thousands, and she excitedly posted pictures of herself sleeping in the office, and for a few weeks was Musk's primary mouthpiece on Twitter about upcoming changes, posting product updates first.

Then he fired her too.

Some people have addictive personalities and is why they have to learn to go cold turkey from any type of addictive stimulant. Some find it so difficult to escape that they simply must replace one habit for another (a lot of recovered heroin addicts end up smokers).

Likewise, there are certain mental and personality attributes that make some people more susceptible to cults. Proper cults, or even more societally acceptable ones like religion or multi-level marketing.

The author has a demonstrated track record of this, and as such is difficult to see as an impartial observer of her time at Twitter because it is necessarily coloured by this lens.

1. It doesn't proclaim to be a solution. It just points out the counterintuitive outcome of unfiltered tolerance leads to authoritarianism and intolerance.

And as you point out, the "solutions" are themselves intolerant, and if abused or do not match the expectations of the rest of the populace, also create something that feels like authoritarianism and intolerance to some of the population.

When confronted with this conclusion, you have two options:

A) Decide that authoritarianism and intolerance is inevitable, and simply aim to be on the right side of repression, aligning yourself with whoever is the most powerful and violent.

B) Try to understand what level of intolerance is the relevant acceptable one for the majority of your culture/population, and strive to find a balance, even if it's not the balance a different culture/people's/nation on the other side of the planet would take.

I choose Not A.

2. I responded to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015214