• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle



  • The best selling car in America last I checked was the Ford F-150, which costs slightly more than a Tesla Model 3. By your math, people who can afford a car payment are rich?

    What I’m trying to get you to understand is that the people you started this thread wishing harm to are mostly not millionaires, they’re people who are one layoff or one medical bill away from the abyss, just like most people in America. Your hate for Musk makes perfect sense, and he HAS been obviously an asshole for a long time, and the hero worship he got early on IS and always was stupid as hell. But people catching strays in this fight just because they bought a car doesn’t make any sense.

    If you’re going to run everyone through a purity test based on who gets their money, it only makes sense that you should hate on every truck owner too for buying more gas than they need, hate on every Facebook user for making Zuckerberg rich, hate on every person who shops at Walmart for helping destroy retail. Basically, if your test of a good person is “have they ever spent money that went to a billionaire who’s destroying the world” then you haven’t got an ally in the world.


  • Nah, quite the opposite. My point is that we have to live in the society we’re in. You want to label one billionaire asshole as worse than the others just so you can feel smugly superior to people who are, for the most part, more leftist than the average and in the same working class bucket you presumably are. It doesn’t help anyone.

    Shit on Musk, shit on Tesla. They deserve it. Don’t shit on the people who should be your allies. It’s counter productive.


  • So you’ve never done business with a company who’s CEO is an asshole? Never bought gas, used Windows, googled something, gotten on Facebook?

    I knew full well this guy was an asshole. So is pretty much every CEO in America. You can’t opt out, you can only choose which asshole you want to do business with. The holier-than-thou bullshit because Musk is the asshole of the day helps no one. If you buy oil at all, you’re funding an industry that has lobbied governments around the world to buy more oil for literal generations, all while knowing the harm it was causing and the people it was killing and would kill.

    It’s cool that you’ve picked the Nazi you hate over the ones that had the good sense to stay home, but it’s childish at best to think that makes you a better person.


  • I disagree. He’s done enough that calling him a Nazi feels accurate to me. Or at least enough of a Nazi sympathizer that I totally support not doing business with him.

    What I get frustrated by is justifying hurting the people that have his cars. Having a Tesla does not make one a Nazi sympathizer. You could maybe make the case that buying one today might, but even then I don’t think it’s justified attacking people for having a car.

    If you want to be an extremist about it, hurt the dealerships and the company. Don’t go after people who are almost certainly not that different from you. The people keying cars just want to feel smugly superior to someone and feel morally justified for being an asshole, they don’t want to make anything better for anyone. If that’s how you act, you’re just a fascist with a slightly different ideology.


  • It’s not locked in such a way that only Tesla can do it, but it can be hard to find places that will service them. Especially smaller shops just don’t want to go through the hassle of figuring it out, and figuring out how to order parts and such, at least where I live.

    Basically, it is going to depend on the shops near you and while Tesla doesn’t seem to actively prevent it I think they make it enough of a hassle for other shops that it may be true in some places that you can only rely on them for repairs.


  • Like the comment you’re replying to said, it kind of has to go back to either one race is generically inferior, or one race is disadvantaged for other reasons. Any other confounding variables, like income level, go directly back to the same point: If black people have less money, is that because there’s something inherent in them that makes them less capable of making money, or have they been disadvantaged by a system that prevents them from making money?


  • I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?

    In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.

    However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.


  • This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn’t materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn’t really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn’t really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven’t.

    These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can’t replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn’t quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.

    I genuinely believe AI isn’t over hyped in the long run. We’re going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it’s still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they’re going to be paying big for that mistake.