nobody wants to live in a carbon free world if every company is as abusive as Tesla to its employees. and that culture came from Musk himself. the way he treats people does not make for sustainable relationships.
It’s about maintaining everything in tension sustainably. No excuses, there are no heroes.
(early Tesla investor because climate change is existential, no current exposure, none planned)
Such a tired trope. For all intents and purposes Musk is absolutely a founder of Tesla.
> It is basically a terrible car maker know for its poor quality
And someone should tell all of the satisfied Tesla customers how terrible quality their cars are https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/tesla-tops-list-most-satisfie...
You cannot know that for sure. Maybe we find the holy grail, or maybe the company doesn't survive idiocy of its fake founder.
I love the mission. I would never work there. They expect grueling hours and a level of commitment that I don't want to give.
It is not abusive to voluntarily work somewhere. It is not abusive to have a culture of work that is way more intense than the average workplace.
The level of Urban's golem-think [1] that exists around Musk because he himself sometimes says stupid things is seriously unbelievable.
[1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/tim-urbans-whats-our-proble...
What? I would gladly live in such a world, and I imagine the majority of people on the planet would as well.
I don't see that at all. I mean, by any reasonable standard Tesla is... just another employer. It's true that the tenor of the discussion around them is quite frankly batshit. But... they're just a company. Every big corporation has a laundry list of terrible accusations, that's just the way capitalism works.
I mean, take Musk and all his nonsense off the board and tell me if you really believe Tesla is a worse place to work at than Walmart or FedEx or UnitedHealth or wherever. I just don't see it.
So... yeah. Bring on the carbon-free world of occasionally abusive capitalist overlords, please.
Even if Starship was the dirtiest of a rocket (it isn’t), a rocket flight is only as dirty as a B777 flight, thousands of them happening everyday.
Try this exercise. Measure how much carbon incurred by an activity that you absolutely love, such as playing video game, and see how much you could contribute by not doing it. A lot of activities is worth doing, even if there is inevitably carbon cost, even if you don’t think it’s worth it.
Also what’s the alternative right now? Hydrogen made from the same methane by steam reformation? We don’t even have long range aircraft running on anything but jet fuel, which is more polluting than methane.
Nothing about Starship is incompatible with carbon neutral fuels.
They will have to be launching commonly long before they put hundreds of passengers on flights in 2028 (their timeline).
Fortunately some French scientists figured that out how to do that 126 years ago.
Why do you think they can move faster on that than on tech invented prior to the birth of the oldest currently living human?
Why?
Like this?
> All Tesla Supercharger stations in regions affected by California power outages will have Tesla Powerpacks within next few weeks. Just waiting on permits.
And:
> Over time, almost all [superchargers] will disconnect from the electricity grid.
> Tesla Supercharger will over time allow you to travel anywhere on pure sunlight for free
It really doesn't make sense to disconnect them from the grid if they aren't next to tons of solar, their physical footprint often isn't big enough to capture enough.
Even the notable labor relations board case that Tesla lost was about employees attacking other employees with racial slurs (usually Hispanics on blacks which is common in California) and low level management not doing anything about it. Yes it’s bad but it’s not “Tesla is abusing it’s employees” and Tesla long ago took corrective action as the lawsuit has been going on many years.
So I’m still struggling if the perception I’ve seen on the internet about Tesla is just people misinformed of the US or if it’s something else.
Tell me again which news network is the largest?
It's completely lopsided.
I actually think he is smarter than people give him credit for, politically.
One of the major problems right now is conservatives, who are about half the country, aren't into supporting renewable energy anything (but liberals will continue to buy Tesla products even if you piss them off a little). A lot of what's he's been upto lately is attempting to socially engineer renewable energy into the conservative world, which is a tough problem to crack to begin with.
I think ford rolling out the electric F-150 will do way way more to move the conservative world toward electric vehicles than Elon posting memes on Twitter. Eventually someone they know will be talking about the low maintenance and good features, and no one likes high gas prices.
As a Tesla owner, I’m not buying a second one, but it has nothing to do with politics. The promised features of the car haven’t materialized and other manufacturers are much closer to the type of self driving that matters to me, hands off the wheel, I can do something else when I’m in traffic jams. That said, none of my friends who are proud conservatives would ever buy a Tesla, they revile the brand. Someone (liberal) in my family pointed to Elon’s antics as the reason they chose a mustang e. If he’s a genius at social engineering Tesla into the conservative brain, I haven’t seen any results in my little slice of the world. Not sure what’s happening in the rest.
(I 100% agree that he should be criticized for a lot of things, but nuance is not trending apparently.)
There are many ways to increase adoption of renewable energy that don't involve putting down minorities, being racist, sexist and all around offensive and acting with the maturity of a spoilt teenager.
Two of them being through government regulation and incentives which are major contributors to Tesla's success.
(Edit: if you're going to downvote me, please briefly explain what I missed, I can be reasoned with... lol)
You can disagree with that characterization or interpretation, but it's not an ad hominem because it's the main subject matter in this context.
I think you could make a very good case against that comment, but "ad hominem" isn't it IMO. I'd argue {{citation needed}}, "lacks substantiation", "slightly hyperbolic", or something like that.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-te...
And he has been significantly worse since acquiring Twitter.
Seriously people, if you're going to call out logical fallacies, make sure you don't call out the wrong thing.
Half of the list is “didn’t take covid as seriously as we think he should”.
The only potentially sexist thing on that list is calling Warren “senator karen”.
Ok so do you have proof of him being racist or sexist or not?
Already the world is moving away from the US dollar hegemony, a move that will impact our children, and children’s children if we as a country don’t participate in these evolving times. There’s numerous other examples of the world making decades-long plans that the US is not positioning ourselves appropriately for. We’re distracted by such tribalism on both sides.
The United States won’t be taken over by an outside power, no, we’re doing well enough eating ourselves from the inside.
More likely is that he doesn't sleep enough and/or is getting older and/or is under a lot of stress and/or is in a crazy trump-news-cycle-like feedback loop, and that he's just developed some pretty big blind spots, like any other mere mortal.
Elon Musk is not (and never has been) a politician. What exactly do you think he should do differently?
So much this, my god... And politics aside, everything Elon says about public health seems to be pretty dumb too. It's a good reminder that you can be extremely brilliant in your field but still no better than an average schmuck on other topics.
This is why we don't have a choice but to specialize and why we defer to expertise. In the 1600s you could be on top of all science-- that's simply not even remotely possible any longer for any individual.
Elon is right about one thing: the value of reasoning by first principles! :)
To add more to this, I would argue that our tendency to oversimplify subjects is a large part of many of the issues we face today. Important to remember that first principle reasoning is not the same as first order thinking. Most of the problems we face today are deceptively complex (appear simple on the surface but aren't) and first order approximations aren't good enough and can actually lead you away from a solution rather than towards. First principle thinking does require you to reevaluate your assumptions as well as constantly having serious doubt (challenging your own ideas).
However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected.
This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.
Nobody wants more clueless WHO driving things
It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.
And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.
That’s rude and arrogant. “Copy and paste my previous reply”, “the timeline is not going to fill itself”. mc32 is trying to present his argument and you reply with these short quips.
If you’re trying to present a counter-argument, this strategy works against you, as it makes mc32 appear more reasonable and knowledgeable.
In China's case, it means that simultaneously a bunch of people would be welded into their apartments, but that the government would also cover up and ignore high-enough level officials who disregarded orders, or criticism that they were ignoring important vectors. China is very corrupt: whatever they announced they were doing publicly wasn't done remotely effectively - it was PR for how tough and untouchable the government is.
It doesn't need to be perfect. Depending on the specific intervention in question, you only need to exceed some critical threshold of compliance to get R_t below 1.0.
i'm not sure which example makes you think things could have been different.
With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.
We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?
We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.
Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?
Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.
After that period there were measures of varying strictness applied in different areas, some of which were beneficial, and some did more harm than good. Some were based on a mistaken notion that the virus could be locally eradicated. Others were based on good science to blunt spikes of infections, again to reduce strain on the medical system, or to buy time for vaccinations.
We can't look at complex issues as black and white.
If you genuinely want to discuss this honestly (I am skeptical, but prove me wrong), we should do it in a more appropriate forum / context.
The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.
You must be dreaming. There was not even any way to assess who was infected in the early days. Nobody was able to contain it either so your expertise needs to face hard facts
To oversimplify things: you can't spread a virus if there's no one to spread it to.
(we also learned a lot though, like how viruses spread through central ventilation systems in apartment complexes)
Sources:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Oh great, another "expert". Yeah, if only we put you in charge things would've been totally different, right?
I think it's pretty clear by now that the reaction to the disease has been grossly mishandled by the so called "public health experts" which acted against evidence that was already available at the time (children not in serious danger from COVID), or which made up evidence (vaccines stop infection, etc..).
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
Exactly. So whatever you said about stopping the spread is unfeasible in the real world.
(cue: how many minutes until commenter replies with some bad counter-argument that ignores exactly half of the words I used in that sentence? I'm even going to tell you which ones ahead of time because I don't want to bother replying to your upcoming reply: at the population scale.)
That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.
Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.
Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).
It's the same reason a carbon tax type system will never work, because there will be some subset of our world that would want to take advantage of a situation for their own financial gain, even if it hurts everyone else in the long run.
It's an almost completely useless model to apply to countries like Bangladesh or Peru.
Btw, I've looked through your earlier replies to others under this comment, and I have to remark that you took a very patronising tone, which I found unfortunate.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
If literally everybody stays home you can stop a disease like covid19. Otherwise, even with draconian countermeasures it will take way too long to snuff the thing out.
The only countries that somewhat managed do achieve that, are Australia and New Zealand, which are islands with long-term restrictive border control (completely a no-go in the US). And even they needed months of lockdowns. And ultimately failed.
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world.
This is infeasible. If we had a system for global heavy-handed coordinated action we'd be much worse off than what COVID did; the political ramifications of that sort of measure would be disastrous. We went in to COVID with economic concerns and a bit of turmoil in the world and came out the other side with a rolling economic crisis and a potentially brewing WWIII. Having a reliable mechanism for triggering that sort of thing would end poorly. Also the US already spies on everyone, having mechanisms to be able to enforce its whims would only make the situation worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
There is no need for digital mass surveillance to enforce a quarantine. It's been done before computers were invented.
How do you intend to achieve this miracle? Will the plan involve Maoist policies? How will the plan be hardened to prevent its being used for Maoist policies? Any mechanism that could possibly coordinate a worldwide lock-down of everyone is eventually going to be used to implement a "common sense" policy that starves ... these days it could be a billion people if coordinated globally. That is a much worse idea than the COVID pandemic which, apart from the lockdowns, was nowhere near as bad as a system that could allow global coordinated action to disable the world economy in coordinated fashion on demand.
The thing you're avoiding talking about seriously is the part that isn't already a certainty. Ie, the entire question.
It's a certainty because it happened. R_t fell under one as a result of NPIs, not immunity.
You don't have to keep R_t under 1 forever. Just for long enough that the virus fizzles out. It's possible and in fact it has been done repeatedly.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/pfizer-vaccine-adolesc...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/12/01/modernas-covid-vaccine-...
And on, and on, and on. Oh yeah there was also this fun one:
“But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President added.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/16/politics/joe-biden-warnin...
(The aforementioned winter of severe illness and death didn't happen)
And today we have
"Growing share of Covid-19 deaths are among vaccinated people, but booster shots substantially lower the risk"
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/health/unvaccinated-covid...
Gaslighting, moving the goal posts, etc.
Donald Trump is the last person you should take medical advice from. He was criticized nonstop by medical professionals, scientists and even scientific journals for saying all kinds of crazy things, and this is the least of it.
Link 2
That study has a confidence interval that is not reported in the news article.
Link 3
The article says the data shows 100% effectiveness against "severe covid" (which is defined in very precise terms), but again this will have a confidence interval which is not reported here.
Link 4 / Biden quote
"you’re protected from severe illness and death" is accurate. No mention of 100%.
Link 5 / last quote
Also accurate.
---
Bottom line: politicians are not who you need to listen to for medical advice (yes that sucks, and yes they should do better). Also you can't blame scientists, doctors and public health experts for your own misunderstanding, for the fact that you get your information from dubious places, and for your inability to grasp nuance. Also, public health messaging is insanely difficult even in the best of conditions: even when the message is 100% accurate there will be second-hand reports that get it wrong, and people who understand the complete opposite of what is said. You need to understand this if you want to hope to understand what's happening.
Humans are quite bad at evaluating low risks, comparing low risks, and balancing individual freedoms vs group good. The default position of most people was that authorities should use force to make everyone conform to one position.
Truthfulness, knowledge of statistics, and the ability to change positions based on new incoming information were severely lacking. Most people picked a team and fought for it relentlessly.
He promotes GOP candidates and favors right wing journalists. He engages in QAanon conspiracies on his network. He’s one of many right wing operators who started or bought social media sites.
Donating the personal maximum to both parties is nothing compared to what is essentially $44B in-kind campaign contribution.
Short of Democrats passing one of those economy-destroying net wealth taxes, or a truly-absurd unrealized capital gains tax; the damage is done for Musk. Granted, taxes of this nature being what they are, he will likely be able to recover some of that amount in future years.
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[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-o...
In my mind, if you take a loan against your equity, you are realizing the current market value. This would be difficult to implement (especially with private companies and options), but it would close a big gap in the tax system that is primarily used for tax avoidance. [2]
---
[1] I completely agree that taxing unrealized gains in the current system would be a terrible idea.
[2] The main non-tax reasons I can think of are retaining voting power and cashing out on pre-ipo stock.
I don't know how it works for the ultra-wealthy, but regular investors can draw a loan against their deposits with securities-based lines of credit (SBLOCs). SBLOCs have a limit smaller than the total value of your portfolio, but your collateral is still the current securities.
I'm mainly spitballing here, but I agree it would be extremely difficult to implement fairly. I just think it is worth investigating.
If it's a large amount of shares, there should still be a liquidity discount (not exactly a DLOM, but something like that, because when you try to sell a large amount quickly, you can't get your order filled at the market rates without depressing the market rates).
Plus, as we have just discussed, you can presume that even if the shares are fully liquid, part of the gains (if there are gains) will be taxed, and that's money that might not be available to pay off the creditor.
On top of that, I'd wager that lenders would subtract an additional safety margin for volatility/risk.
I have absolutely no idea, and please don't quote me on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if creditors applied a ratio of at least 1:2.
---
Edit: this random website I stumbled upon on the first page of Google search results for the query "using share equity as collateral" (no idea how reliable or representative this is) seems to indicate that a ratio of 1:2 (they say "50%") is applied. They also say that you could expect to pay about 1% in interest annually. https://www.ennessglobal.com/portfolio-finance/securities-ba...
They also mention that there may be qualitative factors that come into play:
The key points a lender will look at are:
- The value of your securities
- What the security is made up of
- The liquidity of the security
- If the security is listed, which exchange it is listed on
- How concentrated the shares are
- The industry or field the company trades in
- The management teamPaying interest instead of tax is only necessary because the anti-tax movement isn’t done. The lender’s income tax is included in the interest.
Tycoons expect to be worth Trillions. The $20-30B in Tesla that he rolled into Twitter was crumbs.
Exceptions don't make the rule or negate all the correct things one says.
Looks like you were living under a rock over the past 3 years. COVID showed how useless or harmful experts actually are.
I think the only way to honestly hold this opinion is to have no idea how mind-bogglingly immense current scientific knowledge is (nevermind the scope of everything we don't know and the magnitude of the task of figuring out where the boundary between the two is).
On another note, here's an interview with a crazy narcissist who bought twitter on a lark discussing the vision for reducing political toxicity on social media at a Morgan Stanley conference. Have you ever listened to an actual primary interview on the plan for twitter rather than a clickbait article on the topic? https://www.youtube.com/live/zpcgHK_fXRo?feature=share
We had geopolitics before oil. Just ask the Athenians and Spartans or Romans and Carthaginians. The Mongols didn't go running around Eurasia for oil, and neither did Napoleon around Europe.
Oil may be less thing, but there are others. Per Thucydides, three fundamental motives are: fear, honour, interest.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_W...
Energy is the most valuable resource today. If it is no longer concentrated regionally then the driving force for war is greatly reduced.
I can't help thinking that oil and combustion engines are here for a long time. The energy density is unbeatable. As renewables succeed, oil's utility doesn't disappear. So it seems like we would find some new equilibrium.
EVs benefit from cost scaling too. In Norway >80% of new cars sold are EVs 5 years ago it was -10%. Last year 20% of the Chinese market was EVs. As costs scale (Tesla has a 25k$ car in development) the same process will happen faster than you think across most markets.
Equilibrium will be established when renewable costs stop declining, this is likely to be after battery costs decline another -70% and solar declines -75%. At that equilibrium price oil will be relegated to use in plastics, lubricants, and other industrial/durable goods applications. If those cost declines are realized oil will not compete on costs with renewables and you literally will not be able to give away an old ICE car.
Although I could totally see this being the case for CO2 + ... -> CH4 + ...
Being a long time climate fatalist, I'm now guardedly optimistic about our eminent surplus energy future. If we can somehow keep warming to 1.5, we just might squeak thru this.
But we haven’t bothered with gas turbine cars and trucks because internal combustion has good enough power density and other relevant advantages (better energy efficiency chief amongst them).
Batteries aren’t good enough for long-haul aircraft, long-haul shipping, small boats and a few other sundry applications, but they’re good enough for road transport.
I will argue that the finite nature of battery related materials, plus their weight, is a major impediment against all-battery powered cars in road transport. They are not "good enough" except as a stopgap until the next idea comes around. Which ironically could just be synthetic fuels, but more likely something like a hydrogen fuel cell car.
Cheap as dirt and you only need milligrams per kW. But it's so cheap you can use a tenth of a gram just to be on the safe side.
This plans makes the case that we can get off fossil fuels with batteries, solar, and wind alone. Nuclear, hydro, geothermal, etc, are simply out of scope.
This plan also carefully omits any mention of climate change or time lines. Smart.
FWIW, Saul Griffith and others anticipate future fission and maybe even fusion, but they won't arrive in time to save us. They'll still be needed. To help with the cool down. For capacity as our current solar and wind build out is retired. Etc.
[1] - https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Supply-Chain/China-weighs-...
What if his political tweets is the result of systematic thinking? If someone holds a viewpoint that differs from ours, does it necessarily imply that their perspective is outrageous and incorrect?
Ironically, in the context of GP's comment, this is a large cause of toxic politics. The demonization of people with different viewpoints and refusal to engage in genuine discourse brews the toxicity.
Maybe, like most of us, he sometimes fails to meet his personal standards, and regrets some of the things he does, but I've personally lost confidence that this is the case.
You don't call someone "pedo guy" without evidence if you are trying to avoid toxic politics.
I'm not sure insulting back someone who insults you, one time in several years, makes you an irredeemably toxic person.
You think that was a fair exchange? That these insults were equivalent?
That guy’s life was put in jeopardy. Calling him pedo guy was exactly the kind of behaviour I’m calling out.
I think it's a dick move for sure. However if we follow your line of reasoning, we end up on a world where everyone is free to insult people more powerful than them with no repercussions.
This sounds like a recipe for creating a lot of bullies. Bullies tend to continue their behavior and continue to escalate as long as they feel like they're the most powerful person in the room. It's generally only when they pick on someone bigger than them (metaphorically) and get rightly smacked down do they learn the error of those ways. Note that this is a generalization: don't take that to mean that a smackdown is the only way they learn, or that they are guaranteed to learn from it!
I'm more of the opinion that if you're going to hurl insults/fists, you deserve whatever happens when someone fights back. It's not like smaller/weaker/less privileged targets are going to have much ability to fight back, so it seems important that the ones who have the ability to retaliate are able to do so, in order to keep bullies in check.
> That guy’s life was put in jeopardy. Calling him pedo guy was exactly the kind of behaviour I’m calling out.
I find this very hard to believe. This sounds more like the kind of thing someone says when pursuing a lawsuit, because they (strategically) have to.
What's your basis for thinking that? If anything I'd say the weaponisation of "kindness and tolerance" to the point that it drowns out speaking the truth and calling out bad behaviour is the biggest problem with our politics.
(And as far as I can see Musk has removed the single most toxic influence on our politics by buying Twitter; even if the discourse on there is now worse than it was before, the benefit from real politicians no longer taking it seriously vastly outweighs any possible costs)
The redefinition of tolerance to mean deference to other people's absurd views is a travesty IMO, but that battle has already been lost.
In any case this "easy answer" is useless in practice; arguing that these policies are unkind or intolerant at best gets you debating semantics, and is usually even less effective than that.
I'm not sure anything has been redefined.
Tolerance is the ability to live in a world alongside people whose views you don't share.
Kindness is the ability to treat those people with respect, despite disagreeing with them.
It would be nice to see influential people expressing these views, instead of making things worse.
It's basically impossible to provide examples without the conversation devolving, so I'll leave it there.
- Refraining from ever saying anything against a person's political views is not kindness. It's possible to disagree kindly, which is indeed the point at issue here
- "The redefinition of tolerance" that you mention is not tolerance, but a convenient misdirection for politicians and other talking heads to use when justifying their demonisation of whichever outgroup is currently the target. The choice is presented as either maintaining the status quo at the expense of the minority, or this twisted phantom version of tolerance that is worse for everyone, thereby shutting down honest respectful discussion.
“I mean McCain/Romney was just a strong choice, and what was the alternative (to voting for Trump) when Clinton and Biden ran? Honestly, not casting a completely insane vote (for Clinton or Biden) doesn’t mean much”.
Granted there does seem to have been a division between McCain/Romney voters and Trump voters.
This is an extremely bigoted statement. It's highly ironic, given the morally superior position you are assuming for yourself, that you don't appear able to see that.
It's a fallacy to think that every choice in every situation is reasonable. More than one choice can be reasonable at the same time, but some choices are patently unreasonable.
Take a given single issue that is a flash point between liberals and conservatives. As a liberal you can say it’s unreasonable. A conservative can see it as completely reasonable and logical.
Furthermore what one country’s liberals can see as unreasonable can be considered quite reasonable by another country’a liberals.
It’s really nuanced. For what it’s worth I think Trump is the worst and most embarrassing President in the history of the US. I have friends and family on the conservative side who voted for McCain and Romney who likewise think so and held their noses to vote for Clinton and Biden.
But at the same time I can see why someone would have reasonably voted for Trump. I completely disagree with them. Very little parts of my life, desires, and visions for the future of this country (or the world in general) intersects with theirs. I hope the vast majority of their vision for humanity never comes to pass. But I can still see their reasons.
- "correct" / "incorrect": for objective questions with no wiggle room. 2+2=4 is correct. Correctness, when applicable, only allows one answer.
- "patently unreasonable": for something to be "patently unreasonable", there has to be no apparent or articulated line of reasoning which can lead to the conclusion. It may not be possible or feasible to prove incorrectness. It is patently unreasonable to vote for anyone for no reason, but it cannot be said to be incorrect. It is patently unreasonable to vote for a political party just because that's what your family does, or to engage with politics as if it were a mere spectator sport, but it cannot be said to be incorrect.
- "reasonable": without any regard for whether you would come to the same conclusion, something is reasonable if there exists at least one line of reasoning which can justify the conclusion. Reasonableness, when applicable, allows for multiple answers.
I am able to say things like "it is reasonable to vote for a political party I do not like", and "it is patently unreasonable to vote for my favourite party in a given situation".
---
> Take a given single issue that is a flash point between liberals and conservatives. As a liberal you can say it’s unreasonable. A conservative can see it as completely reasonable and logical.
Given the definitions above (which are roughly the same as used by judges in admin law, I'm not just making stuff up here), the liberal person in your example is not being reasonable, and the conservative person is probably failing to distinguish between reasonableness and correctness.
I don't disagree, but it is my position in this case.
The irony of posting this while the black bar commemorates Bob Lees murder tastes very bitter.
Is it just the freedom of speech thing? What’s wrong with being pro first amendment? That right, and absolutists who support it, are the biggest reason why the left has been able to gain so much power and make so much progress.
It appears that a large chunk (all?) of the people who call themselves "progressives" are all for gov't censorship when the gov't censors "the right things".
That didn’t happen, though.
> Reducing censorship became “toxic politics”
Musk hasn’t reduced censorship. In fact, he very quickly stepped back from even claiming that, claiming instead that he was maintaining Twitter’s content policies (which, in fact, he never retracted) and even embracing artificial reach limitation (the same “shadowbanning” practice he had early complained of) as a means of enforcing it. It’s true that outside observers that have been tracking content on Twitter since long before Musk took over found that particular forms of hate and abuse (most banned by the written policy) took off under Musk, while other viewpoints (while not engaging in nominally banned conduct) were suppressed, but this shift in bias in content moderation is very much not the same as making it a “more open” platform.
> Musk is now flagged as “not a real leftist”
Musk was never considered even loosely a leftist. It’s very hard to see how a hypercapitalst (in class terms) could remain such while also being a leftist in ideological terms, but if such a contradictory character has ever existed, Musk was never it, and no one ever thought he was. Before he played footsie with Trump, Musk might have been pegged for a center-right neoliberal pro-weed capitalist with a horrible record on race relations that might manage to fit in with the right wing of the Demcocratic Party, but…that’s about as far left as anyone ever thought he was.
> but a right winger,
I mean, race and class issues aside, he’s been endorsing right-wing culture war positions on all the hot issues, so, yeah, that’s kind of how he’s asked to be seen, I don’t think he’s actually ideologically a right-wing culture war extremists, I think he’s just virtue-signalling to that camp because that faction has made naked its willingness to punish enemies and reward allies in industry, whereas the opposing political camp has generally been loathe to do so, at least openly and overtly. But, whatever the motive is, Musk has clearly made a conscious decision about how he wants to be seen, and how he is seen reflects that.
> he’s probably done more for liberal causes than any of these authoritarian phonies.
Leftists don’t support “liberal” causes.
"Conservatives think ... obviously dumb and bad thing" and "Liberals think .... obviously dumb and bad thing" being shouted back and forth is extremely unenlightening.
Please don't straw man the other camp's political views and if you aren't 100% sure you can represent them accurately, just say the thing you believe in and give some basis for why you think that's correct rather than misrepresenting the other side and saying why you think that's wrong.
(I've also heard people call him transphobic, but the evidence they link to is a dog whistle that I'm — continuing the metaphor — unable to hear).
Tesla's recent investor day presentation details their anticipated role in Master Plan 3.
TLDR: 20m cars/year, new $25k model, charger network, battery storage, etc.
You really can’t stomach someone you disagree with politically creating an amazing vision and product that actually improves the world? Is politics that important?
This is just putting a set of numbers to it and summarising why the experts believe it's possible.
Entire countries have adopted national economic strategies based on this stuff. It's not coming out of leftfield as a big surprise to anyone paying attention.
https://energia.gob.cl/sites/default/files/national_green_hy...
I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics. I fear that the major short term risk to humanity is not the environment, but toxic politics.
If renewables are the solution to our energy problems, I like to think kindness and tolerance might be the solution to our political problems. Perhaps he could publish a master plan for that, too.