251–260 of 357 posts
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I'm pulling out my vegetarian pass to say, without hypocrisy, that Neuralink's animal testing record appears to be pretty horrific.
If you're using non-vegan products such as soap, shampoo or certain medicines you are complicit to animal testing as well.
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Yeah sure, because having a disability, the wrong skin color or wrong gender was never the reason for not getting hired.
DEI itself creates the situation where having the wrong gender or skin color was the reason to not get a job. You cannot fight racism/sexism with racism/sexism.
What would your solution be?
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Dont. until we have a solution to the problem that is Elon Musk, and potential future Elon Musks, this type of technology can only be a net negative to society.
Henry Ford was a Nazi. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and drove it into the ground. I think basically any of the leaders who brought us the technology we are using today are cults of personality like this, we just forget about the ones that aren't contemporary. I have yet to see us grow without them.
Between 2018 and 2022 "the company has tested on and killed at least 1,500 animals — over 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, as well as mice and rats." [0] 0: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/12/11/23500157/neura...
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Basically Bioshock's Rapture, but on Mars.
And to have enough candidates for that, he's doing his best to make life on Earth as bad as possible for as many people as possible as fast as possible?
But — despite all the things that should've (but didn't) set alarm bells ringing in my head at the time — until just after he bought Twitter and immediately starting making harmful decisions with its new rules, the output of his companies looked kinda like it was helping improve the world.
With SpaceX, humanity was finally unlocking that cheap spaceflight the Space Shuttle promised but didn't deliver ever since Rockwell started building the Enterprise-née-Constitution in 1974, which is one of the few areas where their work is still going great.
(Buuuut even then, for Mars missions to be viable they must have a working Sabatier plant that fits in the payload bay and can produce 330 tons of methane every 2 years from a Martian atmosphere and irradiance level, and I've not seen any sign of this actually getting worked on by any Musk-group company; such machines would be really useful for Earth's environment, and it's a requirement for his Mars plans as otherwise the Starship vehicles can't return to Earth).
With Hyperloop we were finally getting high speed transit to compete with polluting flights, but TBC has completely failed to do anything noteworthy, not even when it is news-worthy.
With Tesla, we were finally getting non-polluting cars, when the competition was hydrogen vapourware, milk-floats, an excuse for ongoing corn subsidies, and the occasional slow news day when some back-yard inventor made a car that was propelled by springs and/or hamsters.
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What's his vision though? (This isn't me being naive - it's more of me asking the reader of these comments to contemplate this)
I don't like Musk's recent actions or the awful political ideas he's been pushing either, but it's remarkable that people can't see why he's admired by so many people. This sort of blindness is a major reason liberals can't properly respond to the rise of MAGA or Trumpism. They refuse to understand it. Understanding something doesn't mean you agree. You can't properly criticize something you don't understand, nor can…
In my view, Elon's spent most of his good will reputation capital. Of course, we still do have the super-fans who are willing to look past his petulant behavior and give him a pass for his bone-head business moves.
The other take is that he's a genius and a hostile takeover of Twitter was just a checkpoint on the way to making US government his puppet state. Congress is twiddling their thumbs while Musk is apparently preparing to siphon off taxpayer dollars into Space X, Tesla or other ventures.
Either way, it's bad. I loathe the man and fear what could happen.
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In general, yes. With narrow exceptions, employment as a public servant is a matter of public record and subject to public comment. Such comments are not only protected by US constitional law but in many cases are statutorily required to be taken into account by regulatory proceedings. This makes it rather galling that Elmu is seeking to shield DOGE employees from such accountability, but understandable when people o…
>understandable when people on Reddit are openly advocating their assassination. Is this standard of shielding government employees from accountability applicable only to DOGE employees, or could we also have applied it to the many employees receiving death threats from Elon's fan base? Consistency on this would be welcome.
Briefly, in the firearm age, respecting the popular vote was a Nash equilibrium, because if you lost the vote, you probably wouldn't be able to field enough riflemen to win on the battlefield either, so your best option was to lick your wounds and make do under the opposition party until the next election. Despite the resounding defeats of the US by masses of riflemen in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and of the USSR in Afghanistan in between, that equilibrium seems increasingly unstable in the drone age. The first warning signs of this were the staggeringly unequal death tolls in the US's first Iraq invasion, reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa. Recent examples of this instability might include the US's successful initial invasion of Afghanistan, the US's successful eventual defeat of Daesh in western Iraq (despite the relative hostility of current Iraqi leadership to the US, which counts as a sort of defeat), Israel's utter dismemberment of Hizbullah, Israel successfully stymieing Iran's nuclear weapons program, and Ukraine's surprisingly successful resistance to the invasion by Russia's much larger army. Also Hamas doesn't seem to be doing very well at defending Gaza.
Unfortunately the literature I could recommend to you on this topic has mostly been flagged as wrongthink, so I won't recommend that, but Slaughterbots is probably still safe to watch. It contains the memorable line "nuclear is obsolete", a riff on Putin's remarks at Valdai in Sochi 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
It's fiction, of course, but thought-provoking fiction, scripted by leading AI researchers to be as realistic as possible, and it may have more truth in it than we would like.
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What's his vision though? (This isn't me being naive - it's more of me asking the reader of these comments to contemplate this)
I don't like Musk's recent actions or the awful political ideas he's been pushing either, but it's remarkable that people can't see why he's admired by so many people. This sort of blindness is a major reason liberals can't properly respond to the rise of MAGA or Trumpism. They refuse to understand it. Understanding something doesn't mean you agree. You can't properly criticize something you don't understand, nor can…
> The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.
Could we have actually built an affordable commuter EV a decade earlier?
Eyeballing this graph, batteries were about 6x more expensive a decade before Tesla actually started delivering the Roadster: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
OTOH, perhaps the extra demand would just have made prices fall sooner, given the other graph in the link shows the relationship between market size and price, rather than year of price…