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Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?


Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook cofounder who later went on to start Asana, claimed in a Threads post on Wednesday that the EV maker has misled consumers "on a massive scale," accusing Tesla of lying about its Full-Self Driving software and the vehicle's ranges.

Spokespeople for Tesla and Asana did not respond to a request for comment.
Have to admit, Musk does come back with some clever replies:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk did not directly address Moskovitz's allegations but instead, on Friday, hurled insults and a slur at the Facebook cofounder on X.

Musk then followed up with another post: "I'd like to apologize to Dustin Moskovitz for calling him a 'retard'. That was wrong. What I meant to say is that he is a pompous idiot whose his head is so far up his own ass that he is legally blind. I wish him the best and hope that someday we can be friends."
Not this time though, obviously.

Don't know either way but I suppose poor range and killing people are important factors for share price.
 
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Tbf, the problem is exaggerated range. Their real range is still better than most competitors'. But given the ongoing self-driving fiasco, it would be hard to take claims at face value.
 
I'll put this here because the piece is about tech billionaires who are Musk-adjacent. Indeed, according to the article, Musk appears to be a fan of the primary figure the article features, Balaji Srinivasan who is advocating for San Fansisco to be 'ethnically cleansed'. At the end of the day what he seems to be advocating is a kind if tech neo-fascisim and he is taken seriously by similarly wealthy peers:

 
I'll put this here because the piece is about tech billionaires who are Musk-adjacent. Indeed, according to the article, Musk appears to be a fan of the primary figure the article features, Balaji Srinivasan who is advocating for San Fansisco to be 'ethnically cleansed'. At the end of the day what he seems to be advocating is a kind if tech neo-fascisim and he is taken seriously by similarly wealthy peers:


Srinivasan ideas read like a 15-year-old's bad Ayn Rand dystopia on Fanfiction.net, and like all Libertarians, he forgets about all the people in service industries.
 
Not to mention the immense importance the existence of a large reserve army of labour has to their own creed. Often these people don't seem to have bothered to try and understand their own economics before they mouth off.
 
An entertaining and telling thread:




And the replies are a perfect illustration of why what he wrote is correct :(

A cascade of blue ticks, the vast majority (based on the random sample I checked) accounts created in the past 5 years, the majority in the last 1-2 years. Just seems bonkers that those who seem so sure of ‘how things were back then’ are the ones with the least direct experience of it.
 
Srinivasan ideas read like a 15-year-old's bad Ayn Rand dystopia on Fanfiction.net, and like all Libertarians, he forgets about all the people in service industries.
God he’s peak insufferable reckless tech bro isn’t he. To be honest I can't even begin to work out Silicon Valley, as soon as I try and grasp something to hold onto, I get conflicting thoughts. I know this type though - they simply believe that mankind should be propelled forward cosntantly by tech, and they are probably right - kind of feudual lords of Neoliberalism. I don't think people sometimes realise how important these folk are to the way we live now, compared to say 30 years ago, and that our futures are mainly in these types hands. We are right in the middle of the tech revolution and it will i think dwarf the industrial revolution. At least that had a clearish scope in which mankind could kind of settle around and work out and contextualise - tech however is constantly changing, as soon as its one thing, its another almost immediately. he sounds a right cunt though, tbh.
 

From what I've heard about how toxic and demanding workplace culture can be in the US, I seriously don't understand why anyone over there puts in any more effort than what is contractually laid out. In countries like Japan or France I can at least understand why someone would go the extra mile, since they've generally got better job security over there. But if you kiss your boss's ass in the US, all you end up doing is degrading yourself before being let go.
 
From what I've heard about how toxic and demanding workplace culture can be in the US, I seriously don't understand why anyone over there puts in any more effort than what is contractually laid out. In countries like Japan or France I can at least understand why someone would go the extra mile, since they've generally got better job security over there. But if you kiss your boss's ass in the US, all you end up doing is degrading yourself before being let go.
One well-established consequence of higher levels of inequality and social domination in society is that individuals in subordinate classes are more likely (rather than less likely) to valorise the individuals and values of the dominant class. There’s a complex mix of reasons for this, including (but not limited to) who gets to set the hegemonic moral framework, the troubled identity of poverty and the ability of the dominant class to mythologise the idea of social mobility, thus undermining class solidarity. So, unfortunately, it isn’t actually surprising at all that the highly downtrodden of the US are less likely to object to the system than the less downtrodden of France. You might even say that the lack of objection is part of the very process that reproduces the inequality.
 
One well-established consequence of higher levels of inequality and social domination in society is that individuals in subordinate classes are more likely (rather than less likely) to valorise the individuals and values of the dominant class. There’s a complex mix of reasons for this, including (but not limited to) who gets to set the hegemonic moral framework, the troubled identity of poverty and the ability of the dominant class to mythologise the idea of social mobility, thus undermining class solidarity. So, unfortunately, it isn’t actually surprising at all that the highly downtrodden of the US are less likely to object to the system than the less downtrodden of France. You might even say that the lack of objection is part of the very process that reproduces the inequality.

I'm not sure that's the whole story. Japan is quite a stratified/hierarchical (right word?) society and workers over there don't seem quite as militant as those in France, hence why I mentioned it as an example.
 
I'm not sure that's the whole story. Japan is quite a stratified/hierarchical (right word?) society and workers over there don't seem quite as militant as those in France, hence why I mentioned it as an example.
Japan has lower inequality than the average OECD country, and much lower perceptions regarding the importance of parental status than average.


I can’t speak to how Japanese workers culturally react to unreasonable demands from their boss, though. And, of course, there’s tonnes more to that than just inequality levels alone — of course there is. The point is merely that it doesn’t work like “the less protection you have, the more likely you are to be militant”. Psychologically and socially, that relationship tends to go the other way.
 
At least traditionally (I think it's changing a bit now) Japanese people's relationship with work & employers is so different from what we're used to in Europe, it probably doesn't serve very well for any kind of comparison.
 
At least traditionally (I think it's changing a bit now) Japanese people's relationship with work & employers is so different from what we're used to in Europe, it probably doesn't serve very well for any kind of comparison.
Yes, having worked for a huge Japanese company it’s a very paternalistic relationship, with working for one form of the company for your entire career still very likely, and company social events eg picnics and supporting sports teams taking up a lot of life outside the office too.
 
Ver much like orthodox Western welfare capitalism of the pre-1980s, that was so taken for granted as being the right thing that you had CEOs of major US firms in the 1960s writing textbooks saying that this is the correct way to do it!
 
Yes, having worked for a huge Japanese company it’s a very paternalistic relationship, with working for one form of the company for your entire career still very likely, and company social events eg picnics and supporting sports teams taking up a lot of life outside the office too.

If you don't engage with post office hours drinks and suchlike, that is frowned on. For all the staff. The amount of young foreigners I've seen over the years looking like they'd rather be anywhere else is depressing.

The whole set up from school to college to the workplace feels regimented.
 
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