Comment by IceHegel 12 hours ago
I think one of the biggest problems in the United States is the misallocation of ambitious people. The highly educated and ambitious people see finance, government, tech, and corporate executive tracks, as the way to convert their energies into social status.
Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.
And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students.
And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.
Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.
There's a question about his actual goals in government.
He's an ambitious person. And AI enables a degree of surveillance state that we find it difficult to even begin to imagine. All the logistical difficulties of something like Orwell's 1984, of the Stasi having 1/3 of Berlin on the books as informants against the other 2/3, go away completely. We have more cameras than ever. Every person gets to enjoy the kind of focus that went into tracking down Luigi. DOGE has exfiltrated all our sensitive databases to servers that they control; Every 'Chinese Wall' intended to ensure some kind of separation of concerns has been broken down, almost certainly including various formally classified intelligence-gathering campaigns. You can't necessarily stuff that genie back in the bottle. If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
It wouldn't be inconceivable to set up an AI to do all the same sort of fraud & identity theft attacks against an individual that for-profit blackhats do, or that a Kiwifarms harassment campaign can do, without much of any actual staffing. Only DOGE starts out with your social security number, your tax records, your drivers' license, license plate reader records, web history, everything. That individual could be a Wall Street Journal editor who wrote something Musk dislikes, or ten thousand Redditors who are making fun of Teslas.
If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.
*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics
I think we would’ve lived in a different world if Elon didn’t use twitter. We might have actually landed on Mars already.
> And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc.
Could he, though?
I mean, he might have the cash, but if you look at his history you don't see that much interest or respect for basic academic principles, or even any basic academic achievement whatsoever.
He conveys an image of someone who is mentally trapped in prepubescence, and who repeatedly does things that a prepubescent kid does to try to gather admiration. I meant who desperately tries to pass themselves off as elite gamers? How long will it take until he moves on to DJing? That's not someone who has any interest in founding education institutions.
The man does have an army of terminally online sycophants, which I now wonder whether they are astroturfed.
> I think the point is he could if he was a different person.
That statement is pointless. The critical factor is not money, it's willingness. You do not even need to be the world's richest man to put together a school. There are pro athletes with a fraction of the wealth that already do meaningful investments in education.
Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters care and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.
One interesting thing is that he seems completely unaware that he is the problem. Stepping back from DOGE to focus on Tesla again. He thinks that him getting closer to Tesla will help save the brand, when it's exactly his association with it that caused the damage in the first place.
The best thing he could do for Tesla would be to step aside.
> I called this Tesla stock crash months ago
TSLA is currently up 5% MoM despite really, really horrible earnings and outlook. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent sometimes.
I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit.
I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.
It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.
The fact that so many "climate activists" and environmentalists turned on him confirms my suspicion that they didn't think so highly about the earth or climate change in the first place. They care about partisan politics and their tribe more than the planet.
> (...) why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?
To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.
Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.
Agreed, and this is a somewhat recent phenomenon (see wtf happened in 1971)
For example, we have 100+ drone startups in the United States. But our overall drone production capacity (hammers in Civ) hasn't actually increased. We just have 100 companies buying grey market from Vietnam and Indonesia, many of which came from China originally.
The way the system should work is if you want to do a drone startup, you need to build a drone factory. That's what the money is for.
If the startup fails, maybe the market leader buys the factory for cheap. This is how the automobile industry was in the United States - a bunch of those companies went bust, but the factories were often kept online by the winners.
Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.
Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.
The problem is that things like houses and boats became political tokens and/or don't have the same profit scaling as software. Housing is mostly restricted by political opposition that made it very hard or even illegal to build much. Building ships is labor intensive which is expensive here, but AFAIK at least construction of navy ships has become a bargaining ship that gets moved around to support senators rather than being allocated to the most efficient place. In general it also seems like unions in the US are somehow more of a problem than in Europe or at least Germany where I grew up. They seem less powerful here but somehow less reasonable.
> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.
I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.
This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.
Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.
I would push on how well GDP measures "economic might".
If I were to tell you a country over five years grew its GDP 5% in 1900, that would mean houses and roads and factories and mines and a whole range of things were built.
In 2020, 5% real GDP growth could be an increase in the value of various services. In fact, you might not need to change the physical world at all to achieve that growth.
They go where it's feasible to go. As long as regulation hamstrings industries, it'd be idiotic to build there. Ambitious people just want everyone else to get out of their way so they (I) can build stuff - and they'll go where there's less resistance.
Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!
That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.
When Elon gets excited about displacing his engineers on a whim with H1Bs, why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?