Well, you would have. Guaranteed.
Are you saying people wouldn’t trust a claim about an invention from a racist exploitative liar?
The hypothetical presumes that the achievement is self-evidently true.
He’s one of the worst and most harmful people on Earth. Of course he’s going to get shit no matter what he does. He deserves much worse. Fantasies about amazing accomplishments wouldn’t change any of this.
I wasn’t claiming that any good or noble achievement would redeem Musk’s standing in the eyes of his detractors; quite the inverse, I said that Musk’s reputation would be an anchor dragging down anything whatsoever.
Likely so. That’s what happens when someone is such a giant piece of shit.
The combination of the energy barrier of normal matter, the Coulomb barrier of individual nuclei, the negligibly low probability of quantum tunneling at all but the shortest distances, and the fact that the physics of nuclear reactions is so incredibly well-understood (and verified) all tells us that low-energy cold fusion should be impossible. All good science is repeatable: set up an experiment, tell me how you did it, report your results, and with the proper equipment, I should be able to set up a similar experiment, do the same things you did and get the same results. If I can’t, and others can’t, you didn’t do good science. And I say this to point out one simple fact: there have been claims of cold fusion, but none of them have ever stood up under the scrutiny of the above definition of good science.
Thing is, that if Elon had been there for the Cold Fusion affair, Elon would had called all the ones not reproducing the “great results” to be “Fagg***” or that they did fall for the Woke virus.
Isn’t that as it should be? I mean we’re not Vulcans - I also won’t pay to see a Roman Polanski film and he frankly is or was an objectively very talented film maker. Maybe in the unlikely event I’m still around in thirty years and Musk has been de-coupled from Tesla (the company) I might buy a Tesla (the car) if it’s the best choice for me.
But I wouldn’t have purchased a VW beetle in 1945.
ETA: Or if that’s too much Godwinization for you, if I was aware just how antisemitic Ford was back in the day when he was running his company, I wouldn’t have purchased a Ford either. Best choice for me or not.
Okay, but infinitely so? Would you rather see the human species go extinct rather than be saved by something Musk did?
We’re so far into hypothetical territory that’s it’s hard to imagine what that could look like that doesn’t involve Musk becoming a totally different person.
Let’s say Musk personally cracks every single problem standing in the way of a Mars colony, and evacuate humans just in time before the Earth collapses. Humanity saved! But Musk is a eugenicist, he’s only interested in saving wealthy white people or hand picked model minorities to live in his tech brotopia, while meanwhile accelerating the destruction of Earth, the very thing you want to credit him with saving us from. Hooray? I don’t care if humans survive if that’s what survival looks like.
Anything else requires him to have some huge moment of introspection where he stops being a piece of shit, at which point he’s the Musk of Theseus or something.
No and I get this counter-argument from his more thoughtful “fans.” Sure Musk may be a malignant pustule who is willfully helping to corrode democracy in the United States, but endeavors like Tesla have the potential to have a tremendous impact on the health of our planet.
But I think it goes both ways - at some point the taint becomes inescapable. The board of Tesla needs to turf Musk out for the good of everybody, because continuing to empower this douchebag is actually bad for society (my humble opinion). How to get them to do so? Well financial pressure through relentless exposure of his whackadoodlery is probably the only thing that’s going to work. It hasn’t so far, but it’s the only thing that could. So, yeah - it’s gone too far with Musk. For me at least.
When Musk was just the asshole CEO who called a guy a pedophile because he wouldn’t accept Musk’s non-solicted opinions? Well, fine - I didn’t much care. Steve Jobs was an asshole, but I still bought Apple products. Many CEOs are assholes, it’s par for the course and almost baked into the system.
But Musk has crossed the line from standard egotistical CEO asshole, to IMHO someone who has willfully damaged American society. I can’t give him a pass for just being a jerk anymore.
Or as Waylon Smithers once put it, “the line between everyday villainy and cartoonish supervillainy”.
No just American society, with his doge effort he has damaged the world by helping get rid of USAID and thus ensuring the death of thousands if not millions of people, no doubt causing structural problems for the societies of those affected by those deaths.
//i\\
All the more reason to be excited about Artemis II…
Twitter is ever so much better since Musk bought it.
Where else could I be called “genocidal industry shill scum” for posting a study showing that people absorb much more aluminum from food than vaccines?
Yeah, the weird health claims about aluminum have always kind of perplexed me. It’s about 8% of the Earth’s crust. Good luck avoiding it.
Well to be fair naturally occurring aluminum is in the form of strongly covalently bonded compounds. The natural incidence of free aluminum ions or metallic aluminum is approximately zero.
Sometimes you have to think outside the bauxite.
Go to your room.