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Another way Musk profits from the collapse of global infrastructure. Smart!<br>
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<div dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/elon-musk-offering-satellite-internet-to-tsunami-hit-tonga">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/elon-musk-offering-satellite-internet-to-tsunami-hit-tonga</a></div>
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<blockquote type="cite">On Jan 21, 2022, at 8:50 AM, glen <gepropella@gmail.com> wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr"><span>Well, except that this solipsism betrays a profound similarity between the cheerful billionaire exploiter and the unfixable deplorables. It's almost psychotically self-centered. I can imagine a slow, corrupting process where I would if
I could, as well. But that transformation would have to be complete closure to prevent any light of empathy or sympathy from peeking in and popping the boil.</span><br>
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<span>I suppose people like Gates are more interesting than Musk, shambling about extruding money according to an opaque template ... less transparently ideological than Musk's profiteering. All philanthropy smacks of this sort of thing, though, Effective Altruism
being the worst of the bunch. Power corrupts. It's not a lesson the non-powerful can actually learn, though. So it's a good thing to keep around a nicely scaled gradation of the super rich and the destitute poor, with some walkability up and down the scale.
That way we can, as a collective, re-learn the lesson that power corrupts on a steady basis. The assumption of equality prevents that lesson from being re-learned. The absurdity of philanthropy and poverty are "collateral damage" in service of the latent trait,
spoken as a well-off white man born into a racist patriarchy, anyway.</span><br>
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<span>On 1/21/22 08:31, Marcus Daniels wrote:</span><br>
<blockquote type="cite"><span>If anything, Musk is suspicious because he is not overtly apocalyptic. Some criticisms of Don’t Look Up were along the lines that it fails to try to persuade a change of course in favor of being condescending. That was the whole
point of the movie: Comic relief among the reasonable who must suffer those who are just unfixable. Musk is amusing because he is cheerful going about his billionaire life as it all comes crashing down. Doing what he can to profit from insane energy policy
of the last several generations and making what contingency plans he can. I certainly would if I could.</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>On Jan 21, 2022, at 7:48 AM, glen <gepropella@gmail.com> wrote:</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>This video essay concludes with the same point:</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>The Fake Futurism of Elon Musk</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>Perhaps a better title would have been "Muskian Futurism is Eschatological". But there's some deeper stuff there in the middle of the video about the appeal of geezers like Sanders to "the youth", perhaps dovetailing with our prior
discussion of the [opt|pess]imism vs hope-despair plane. The mistake the Muskians seem to make is conflating Musk's "apocalyptic help the rich survive the end times capitalism" with the good old fashioned future orientation of classic science fiction ... and,
perhaps, even the optimistic glossing of the present by authors like Steven Pinker. While Pinker seems to be a hypnotized neoliberal cultist, his views still retain some sense of "shared values" in the Enlightenment, where something, vague as it is, like equality
founds the whole perspective. Egalitarian utopias like Star Trek were, it seemed to me, standard fare for classic sci-fi. Gibson, Blade Runner, et al turned that dark and brought us (perhaps correlated with the rise of Hell and Brimstone Christianity) to Muskianism.</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>But this is all just from my nostalgizing as a dying white man. It would be interesting to see a disinterested historian present the plectic arcs.</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>On 1/20/22 14:33, glen wrote:</span><br>
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<blockquote type="cite"><span>Even if there are multiple paths to nearly equivalent optima, each unit (human, hospital, corporation, state) has to share some values with the others in order for the the optima to be commensurate.</span><br>
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<span>-- </span><br>
<span>glen</span><br>
<span>Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.</span><br>
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<span>.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .</span><br>
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