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Discussion (167 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)
Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon
I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.
I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production. Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…
Social media is unhealthy. You know what else is unhealthy? Hacker News' constant bashing of every. single. thing. ever.
Of course Musk talks big. He is almost always late. Lots of things have never happened, or have not yet worked (but they’re still trying)
At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved. Worlds safest car (multiple times) worlds highest selling car (model y), car of the year, massive factories building at a speed and quality that made Toyotas CEO say they’re in trouble and have a lot to improve.
The whole supercharger network that smashes every other one.
World’s first reusable rocket, done it 300 times now. Only two others have done it once. By far, by far more launches than every country and company in the world put together. Starship coming along.
To say that he never does anything is a very, very strange set of blinders to view the world through
"Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here.
>Worlds safest car (multiple times)...
According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
>... worlds highest selling car (model y)...
In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.
>... car of the year...
Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
Ten pads and thousands of flights per year sure will accelerate Golden Dome, err... I mean "going to Mars"
[0] https://www.klfy.com/louisiana/interactive-map-shows-which-p...
But are they building it ghost to ghost?
Florida is more interesting than people realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Coast
Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards.
We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy?
Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."
"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)
Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.
A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.
You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P
Having that intermittently a couple times per day I think will be very disruptive.
I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.
Rockets sometimes fail. SpaceX has one of the lowest failure rates in the industry, but that's still ~0.5%. When they fail near launch, they cause humongous explosions. Because of this, anyone with even a tiny bit of care for people launches over the ocean, so that when it goes oops, it only harms some fish.
The existing launch sites SpaceX uses are good for launching into prograde (Starbase, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL) and retrograde (Vandenberg SFB, CA) orbits, but they are all either unable or kind of marginal for launching into polar/very highly inclined orbits. (Starbase, TX cannot do it at all, Vandenberg SFB, CA has limitations on when you can launch, and Cape Canaveral, FL needs to fly a dogleg which reduces performance.)
Part of their plans for the space datacenters involve launching a lot of mass into sun-synchronous (which is very highly inclined) orbits. For that, they need a launch site with the ocean either to the north or to the south.
Sounds really neat, but "incredibly ambitious announcement" from an Elon Musk company is starting to wear thin.
Is this real, or will it join the graveyard of other incredibly ambitious projects that were eventually abandoned to focus on the next incredibly ambitious project.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure!
> And FSD is coming next year now
It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities.
And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I paid for. It's also gotten dramatically better since then. It drives me to and from work every day without having to so much as touch the wheel. And there is no 2018/19 non-Tesla that can do what it does.
So yes, by all means, keep listing the things you think prove Musk is a fraud. You're mostly just making my point for me.
For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure.
It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
I still feel glad for the SpaceX engineers and scientists who succeed and doing new and innovative stuff. But their employer is just like every other military contractor sucking on the unlimited teets of the US Government. What a waste of taxpayer money.
I grew up in during the Cold War and I'm sick of this shit. America always thinking it has to dominate any country that doesn't bow down before it.
Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.
http://maps.lsuagcenter.com/floodmaps/?FIPS=22113
Fuck Elon get out of my state.
Prove me wrong bro