It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ...

"It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ..."

So, how would you employ the engineers instead?

Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume. The huge churn of capital and labor creates as it's byproducts from time to time items of actual human value.

But those things would be fragile and complicated without the industrial economy surrounding them. If we look at this stage in our species history from far away, currently the industrial economy is supposed to be predictable and mundane.

So, "producing useless crap" is a required feature of our economy so it can occasionally produce science, art, medicine and the other things that actually improve us as a species.

Now, consumer goods fall into two categories: physical and digital. Physical consumer society is turning our biosphere to shit. Digital commodities, on the other hand, are much more lenient on the environment.

So, if we look at it this way, and presume that producing consumer crap is necessary for economic growth and stability, it's much better to work in producing digital goods and services rather than physical ones.

Within this framework, the actual question is not why do the brightest minds work at facebooks, but, will our economy ever develop beyond the point where producing useless crap is not so much a necessity for systemic stability rather than an occasional indulgence.

>>Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume.

As the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. So don’t be so judgmental. :)

No, it's garbage. Individuals living in industrial societies are consuming way more than the ecosystem can support. So, either we need to get rid of people or they need to consume less. I prefer the option where they consume less. If it's not needed for a wholesome life it's "crap".

I consume as much as I can but only because the society lets me, and I'm too burdened at the moment to actively change my way of life.

> I consume as much as I can but only because the society lets me, and I'm too burdened at the moment to actively change my way of life.

Maybe have some sympathy for others? If you feel so strongly and yet don't change your actions, I think it's pretty hypocritical to say other people are consuming a bunch of "crap". Don't get me wrong, there is a ton of waste produced in today's world and more of it than we need. But I think it's important to consider that many people struggle to make ends meet and can't afford the time, money or thinking that many of us here have.

Sorry, are we disagreeing on some point? Maybe I missed something.

We both agree that the western society consumes too much, and in the part of my comment which you extracted I included myself explicitly in the group of people who consume too much. I am having sympathy for people who consume too much and don't change their ways. I'm the first person I have sympathy for in this as I'm preoccupied by other stuff than my lifestyle choices at the moment.

I did not denigrate the people who consume too much, merely the habit of consumption.

The actor and the behavior are two different things. Merely behaving in a bad way does not make the person bad. It merely means they have something to improve in their personal conduct.

Calling stuff people consume "crap" is not the same thing as insulting people. Although, western commercialism has done a great effort in trying to tie persons self worth to their consumer habits.

This psychological link is also crap.

> Physical consumer society is turning our biosphere to shit. Digital commodities, on the other hand, are much more lenient on the environment.

But often turns minds of droves of Humans to shit, and turns every moment of idle human thought into raw material....

I agree that Facebook provides digital value through its social media and messaging platforms, but Facebook’s business purpose is to sell things to consumers. I’d rather have engineers work in physical industries where they can improve goods and lower the waste produced, rather than simply sell more of less efficiently produced goods.

Plus unfortunately Musk is fairly well known for underpaying his staff. So you have to choose to take a paycut to switch from Google / Facebook. To be fair all of Apple/Amazon/Microsoft do at least sell actual products.

Perhaps this is why Google / Facebook open source so much of what they do, so that talented engineers don't just have to say 'I get paid to make people click'.

Underpaying what baseline?

A recently hired software engineer at Tesla, while not giving specific figures, said that the base comp was competitive and the options were $100k+ over the standard 4-year vesting schedule. I've heard similarly from a handful of others; I'd expect the comp to be inline at SpaceX.

Not to mention the growth potential for your stock options between SpaceX and Tesla may be higher than comparable companies.

This doesn't look good:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Tesla-Software-Engineer-Sal...

> Underpaying what baseline?

Facebook / Google

well most companies "underpay" if baseline is FB and Google

A generation or two ago all the brightest minds in the world were working on ways to kill the most people as efficiently as possible.

This is progress.

That's because the only real monetization on the internet is advertising, and ecommerce (which relies heavily on advertising).

Pretty much every consumer website on the internet deals with one of those areas. If it becomes easier to movie money on the internet, we might start seeing new dominating players other than Google (ads), Facebook (ads) and Amazon (ecommerce).

It's not actually sad. Social media and advertising involve incredibly complex and vast search spaces. The problem domains are massive and solving the issues in those fields, like scaling software and hardware, enables us to build tooling and infrastructure that every field can use. So those businesses are the bootstrapper for other businesses. Example: SpaceX wouldn't exist if Paypal didn't exist first.

Just needs a little time. It wasn't that long ago when only a few people had Twitter and FB accounts. IG even took a while to gain main stream traction.

Who thought the future would be giant chemical rockets (100x BFR?)thundering around the solar system? Transportation infrastructure for the solar system, Rail Road Tycoons of space. The potential is immense.

"Who thought the future would be giant chemical rockets (100x BFR?)thundering around the solar system?"

It's not. The math doesn't work, the rocket equation bites too hard. This is one of the reasons to be keeping an eye on the recent claims over the past few years that fusion reactors may be something that could be shrunk down to shipping container sizes in the relatively near future. Get a functioning fusion reactor into space and suddenly the solar system is, if not your backyard, something very reachable.

But it's possible we won't see any practical way to lift off from Earth other than chemical rockets for a while.

Does the rocket equation still bite to hard if fuel production is outside Earth's gravity well?

That's why Musk had art of BFR sitting on a Jovian moon, for the same delta v to get into earth orbit, you can get anywhere else in the solar system, quick (relatively). Big rockets and large mass fractions enable all that, as my comment above indicates. Rocket equation is for real, but so are economies of scale.

There's some opinion there, but personally I would still say yes. There's a lot hiding in the "relatively" in le-mark's sibling comment.

We really need to be able to get places in a couple of weeks, and chemical rocketry just gets absurd for that; even if you can do it, you've got to fling massive refueling stations around and such. A fusion-based system would have power density sufficient to not just fly to Mars in a reasonable period of time, but to fly back without having to be refueled, which means we can go places without first figuring out how to build a fairly expensive and massive infrastructure that allows us to get back.

Even if you use fusion power you need to use some mass that you can accelerate and then expel opposite to your direction of motion. So while you would need less fuel, this is only really true if you also have what would amount to a miniaturized particle accelerator beyond anything we are able to build so far. Or put other words simply producing lots of energy is not enough.

Fusion-based rockets are still too far off. We need something now. Chemical rockets are monstrous, but that matters little once they are built and reused. Fuel is cheap enough.

If you really want something that can be put into production in a matter of years, then it would be fission-based rockets. Maybe they'll be more acceptable if they are not launched from Earth.

Once we have a real space industry I imagine there will be progress in areas like ion propulsion. You'll still need chemical rockets with >1 thrust/weight ratio to get off planetary bodies, but ion propulsion could be much better for long haul trips.

We've already had a lot of recent progress with ion propulsion. Not only are many satellites hybrid or all-electric, but NASA has launched several probes with a lot of maneuvering delta-v of ion thrusters.