This is a terrific set of ideals and I think like many great visions, even if it’s not accomplished directly, it will put wheels into motion that will advance the world in the right direction, and might just help save the environment.
I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics. I fear that the major short term risk to humanity is not the environment, but toxic politics.
If renewables are the solution to our energy problems, I like to think kindness and tolerance might be the solution to our political problems. Perhaps he could publish a master plan for that, too.
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics
So much this, my god... And politics aside, everything Elon says about public health seems to be pretty dumb too. It's a good reminder that you can be extremely brilliant in your field but still no better than an average schmuck on other topics.
This is why we don't have a choice but to specialize and why we defer to expertise. In the 1600s you could be on top of all science-- that's simply not even remotely possible any longer for any individual.
Even today, you don't have to be an expert all low level details to have a non idiotic opinion on COVID. A little kindness, compassion and common sense is sufficient.
I broadly agree, but careful because IMO "common sense" is very much a trap-concept. It's how we usually convince ourselves that our preconceived ideas are right. If science teaches us anything, it's to be very wary of that.
Elon is right about one thing: the value of reasoning by first principles! :)
> IMO "common sense" is very much a trap-concept. It's how we usually convince ourselves that our preconceived ideas are right.
To add more to this, I would argue that our tendency to oversimplify subjects is a large part of many of the issues we face today. Important to remember that first principle reasoning is not the same as first order thinking. Most of the problems we face today are deceptively complex (appear simple on the surface but aren't) and first order approximations aren't good enough and can actually lead you away from a solution rather than towards. First principle thinking does require you to reevaluate your assumptions as well as constantly having serious doubt (challenging your own ideas).
To me, common sense should always be derived from first principles, and there should be legally required that every concept/argument be also decomposable and provable from first principles. Things/concepts should only become common sense after being battle tested socially for 1+ generations. Your parents teach you common sense and there is a paper trail to that common sense's origin. You don't get to create new "common sense" without doing the hard work.
Congratulations on your novel definition of "common sense", however if it takes a generation of socially battle testing a thing to become common sense, you've excluded e.g. "people have smart phones".
Nope, I think the vast majority of opinions on covid have been idiotic, driven by groupthink, and are very much in need of low level knowledge.
Humans are quite bad at evaluating low risks, comparing low risks, and balancing individual freedoms vs group good. The default position of most people was that authorities should use force to make everyone conform to one position.
Truthfulness, knowledge of statistics, and the ability to change positions based on new incoming information were severely lacking. Most people picked a team and fought for it relentlessly.
I agree with this as well, but it's not necessarily mutually exclusive with what the parent comment said. For the average joe, the right opinion for most medical questions is "I'm not sure".
So this is pretty close to my area of expertise. It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of weeks. This thing did not have an outrageously high R_0, and we knew enough in March 2020 to stop the spread.
However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
For people wondering how this could happen, epgui is assuming action happened early on. April 1st 2020 there were 18k new daily cases (<200k cumulative) and <460 deaths (<4k cumulative). The reproduction rate was already in sharp decline (US even had <1 by May 3rd).
To oversimplify things: you can't spread a virus if there's no one to spread it to.
(we also learned a lot though, like how viruses spread through central ventilation systems in apartment complexes)
I used to think this but I don't any longer. Two reasons : 1) asymptomatic, airborne spread makes infection control much harder and 2) your own admission that it would have required "very heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world". This second reason made it impracticable to stop the spread in March 2020. There are countries in the world where you simply cannot apply such heavy-handed action; there is not the level of control of or essential support for the population available.
Btw, I've looked through your earlier replies to others under this comment and I have to remark that you took a very patronising tone, which I found unfortunate.
Not to mention that we massively underestimated the spread of COVID in other species. It’s all well and good to pretend that we could lock down humans, but good luck getting wild animals to socially distance.
I'm gonna guess that there was significant silent transmission. I.e. people who were asymptomatic were spreading the disease. If that's the case, then there is no stopping once it went beyond a few dozen people. The last date that we could've stopped it was probably in 2019, before anyone even knew there was a problem. The Covid-19 might have been one of those few examples of the future being totally ordained and completely unchangeable.
That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.
Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.
It's so tiring engaging with the public about this. No.
Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).
You need to keep it low enough, for long enough, with no reservoir. It's the last part that's the problem. You'd either need to prevent all travel for years, or arrange for everywhere in the world to take action at the same time. The latter is basically impossible.
I'm sorry, but no. Yes, this might work at an academic level, but dealing with the politics of the world and human nature, this thing that you ask cannot happen given the diversity of the politics and cultures of the world.
It's the same reason a carbon tax type system will never work, because there will be some subset of our world that would want to take advantage of a situation for their own financial gain, even if it hurts everyone else in the long run.
But it simply didn't happen. At all in fact, once you look at the whole world. And all of this is based on reported data. We never got a clear picture of what unknown transmission looked like. If I had to guess, it was many-fold worse.
Not to mention what was done, when it was done well, took pressure off the health care system (which was, and is, extremely stressed by the pandemic) which ultimately saved so many lives.
The only countries that somewhat managed do achieve that, are Australia and New Zealand, which are islands with long-term restrictive border control (completely a no-go in the US). And even they needed months of lockdowns. And ultimately failed.
Australian here. It didn’t “ultimately fail”, it partially succeeded. The practical point of lockdown wasn’t a vain attempt to eradicate the virus. It was to buy the population time for vaccines to get tested, manufactured and injected. The statistics leave no room for doubt that thousands of deaths were avoided as a result. The only question is whether the lives saved was sufficient to justify the economic, social, and psychological consequences. Good arguments be made both ways.
If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected.
This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.
Nobody wants to pay taxes either, but sometimes doing things we don't want to do is the best way to optimize quality (and quantity) of life for everyone.
It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.
They have an authoritarian government -one which could weld shut windows and doors ignoring any fire safety issues to lock down a block because there was one case…
And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.
It's a mistake to think "authoritarian" means "effective". It doesn't. Authoritarian governments derive their power from the appearance of power, and that amongst other things means being brutal and never admitting that you're wrong.
In China's case, it means that simultaneously a bunch of people would be welded into their apartments, but that the government would also cover up and ignore high-enough level officials who disregarded orders, or criticism that they were ignoring important vectors. China is very corrupt: whatever they announced they were doing publicly wasn't done remotely effectively - it was PR for how tough and untouchable the government is.
I'm sorry, but this just bolsters my position. There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible. You have to tend to the infirm, you have to run critical systems, people need to eat (not even 50% people have ten days worth of rations stocked up; who is going to distribute more food, water and meds as they run out, etc?)
> There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible.
It doesn't need to be perfect. Depending on the specific intervention in question, you only need to exceed some critical threshold of compliance to get R_t below 1.0.
i think the last two years shown that nothing acceptable from a human rights pov could have been done to stop the pandemic from spreading once it was out of the bag.
i'm not sure which example makes you think things could have been different.
Original COVID had an unmitigated R of about 3. All you have to do is reduce transmission 66% and you beat it. China did this very successfully. The later variants were much more transmissible though.
With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.
We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?
Because we know what a disaster it was at the end?
We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.
Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?
Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.
I think you should read my comment more slowly and more carefully, because if I copy-pasted it right here it would be an adequate response to your response.
Th premise is all governments would have the power to shut things down. They don't. We have civil liberties. It was unfeasible. Even absolute world-wide martial law would not stop it [you can't freeze people in place for ten days straight]. So the statement that it could have been stopped in 10 days if... No, that "if" was not going to happen.
Do you recall the very early days when there was a cruise ship where a passenger caught SARS-COV2 and they anchored it in the SF bay and didn't let anyone off even while some succumbed to the disease and treated passengers as if they had Ebola? Yet, it still jumped and infected people (landlubbers). There was no way "10 days to stop the spread" was going to be effective.
Those people were then transferred into a quarantine facility for two weeks where they weren’t isolated from each other, and then sent home on planes all over America without even being tested for COVID on exit from quarantine.
> keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!
That’s rude and arrogant. “Copy and paste my previous reply”, “the timeline is not going to fill itself”. mc32 is trying to present his argument and you reply with these short quips.
If you’re trying to present a counter-argument, this strategy works against you, as it makes mc32 appear more reasonable and knowledgeable.
The initial lockdowns were intended to prevent a rapid spike in cases that would overwhelm the medical system. That was important, and largely successful. If such measure could have been taken in a globally coordinated, and fairly extreme manner, which was never realistic, then in theory the virus could've been eradicated early on. But that doesn't mean they were worthless otherwise.
After that period there were measures of varying strictness applied in different areas, some of which were beneficial, and some did more harm than good. Some were based on a mistaken notion that the virus could be locally eradicated. Others were based on good science to blunt spikes of infections, again to reduce strain on the medical system, or to buy time for vaccinations.
We can't look at complex issues as black and white.
Australia and New Zealand also had COVID fully contained for a long time (not as long as China). It was possible but very difficult. We just weren’t up to the task.
The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.
You can't stop the spread because a large percentage of the workforce simply has to keep working to keep society functioning. Electricity, water, garbage pickup, supermarkets, hospitals, fire department, etc. You can't do without those. And people who work in those vital industries need to bring their kids to daycare/school, otherwise they can't work.
If literally everybody stays home you can stop a disease like covid19. Otherwise, even with draconian countermeasures it will take way too long to snuff the thing out.
The lockdown idea is appealing but the devil is in the details, you have to limit group sizes. If the transmissible window is say 3 days, and the group size limit is 5, that's a 15 day lockdown. In practice big households are impossible to limit so in theory if you don't lock down for O(household members) you waste time.
That seems very implausible and needs a better argument than an "area of expertise". By March 2020 there were cases popping up everywhere [0] and it wasn't just travellers from China. It'd take a handful of undetected cases in India and Africa and then how exactly would you plan on stopping COVID spread?
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world.
This is infeasible. If we had a system for global heavy-handed coordinated action we'd be much worse off than what COVID did; the political ramifications of that sort of measure would be disastrous. We went in to COVID with economic concerns and a bit of turmoil in the world and came out the other side with a rolling economic crisis and a potentially brewing WWIII. Having a reliable mechanism for triggering that sort of thing would end poorly. Also the US already spies on everyone, having mechanisms to be able to enforce its whims would only make the situation worse.
It's a very simple argument. If you hold R_t under 1, the number of cases decreases exponentially. Eventually, you can unlock localities while restricting movement, and after some time the whole thing is dead in its tracks. This is something that almost every country eventually got around to doing anyways for probably longer on aggregate than it would have taken, it just wasn't timed right.
There is no need for digital mass surveillance to enforce a quarantine. It's been done before computers were invented.
Ooh! Oh we have to keep R_t under 1! Nobody thought of that. I wish the experts had spelled that out for us. Sorry to drip sarcasm but that is upsetting me.
How do you intend to achieve this miracle? Will the plan involve Maoist policies? How will the plan be hardened to prevent its being used for Maoist policies? Any mechanism that could possibly coordinate a worldwide lock-down of everyone is eventually going to be used to implement a "common sense" policy that starves ... these days it could be a billion people if coordinated globally. That is a much worse idea than the COVID pandemic which, apart from the lockdowns, was nowhere near as bad as a system that could allow global coordinated action to disable the world economy in coordinated fashion on demand.
COVID spread is an exponential process - you can't possibly do anything to stop R_t dropping below 1 from time to time. It saturates then recedes until a new variant appears. It it could possibly stay above one, we'd literally all have multiple cases of COVID right now. And I bet it does that fractally, so particular populations are all saturating and then seeing cases recede all the time.
The thing you're avoiding talking about seriously is the part that isn't already a certainty. Ie, the entire question.
R_t fell under 1 when the population was still naive. If you don't let the virus proliferate massively to begin with you won't have variants that are adapted to human immunity.
It's a certainty because it happened. R_t fell under one as a result of NPIs, not immunity.
You don't have to keep R_t under 1 forever. Just for long enough that the virus fizzles out. It's possible and in fact it has been done repeatedly.
> . It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of week
You must be dreaming. There was not even any way to assess who was infected in the early days. Nobody was able to contain it either so your expertise needs to face hard facts
A stronger example would probably be New Zealand, just because stats from China are very difficult to ascertain. (China did a lot of things right, but they also did a lot of things very wrong.)
> So this is pretty close to my area of expertise.
Oh great, another "expert". Yeah, if only we put you in charge things would've been totally different, right?
I think it's pretty clear by now that the reaction to the disease has been grossly mishandled by the so called "public health experts" which acted against evidence that was already available at the time (children not in serious danger from COVID), or which made up evidence (vaccines stop infection, etc..).
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
Exactly. So whatever you said about stopping the spread is unfeasible in the real world.
Vaccines do prevent infections at the population scale.
(cue: how many minutes until commenter replies with some bad counter-argument that ignores exactly half of the words I used in that sentence? I'm even going to tell you which ones ahead of time because I don't want to bother replying to your upcoming reply: at the population scale.)
Of course! Just give up a little freedom here, and a little freedom there, and once we're all in prison cells we will have all the security we need! Common sense.
"The vaccine is 100% effective and will keep you from getting or transmitting COVID." You mean that kind of common sense? The difference between Elon and most people on here is he has a long enough memory to realize he's being gaslit. With regards to politics, he has a memory long enough to remember when the left was pro-free speech and anti-war and how quickly that all changed over the last few years.
And on, and on, and on. Oh yeah there was also this fun one:
“But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President added.
Donald Trump is the last person you should take medical advice from. He was criticized nonstop by medical professionals, scientists and even scientific journals for saying all kinds of crazy things, and this is the least of it. My 12 years of postsecondary education have not prepared me to articulate exactly how stupid this person is. It's indescribable.
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Link 2
That study has a confidence interval that is not reported in the news article. CNN is not a great authority for health advice. It's okay to watch/read it, but then it's incumbent upon you to verify the technical details. They get science stuff wrong all the time, and so do all other non-specialist news organizations.
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Link 3
Despite the super misleading name, this is a pro-industry lobbying organization. This website is not where you go to find health advice. Notwithstanding, the web page says the data shows 100% effectiveness (n = approx 30,000) against "severe covid" (which is defined in very precise terms), but again this will have a confidence interval which is not reported here.
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Link 4 / Biden quote
"you’re protected from severe illness and death" is accurate. No mention of 100%.
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Link 5 / last quote
Also seems accurate, at a glance. No mention of 100%.
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Bottom line: politicians are not who you need to listen to for medical advice (yes that sucks, and yes they should do better). Also you can't blame scientists, doctors and public health experts for your own misunderstanding, for the fact that you get your information from dubious places, and for your inability to grasp nuance. Also, public health messaging is insanely difficult even in the best of conditions: even when the message is 100% accurate there will be second-hand reports that get it wrong, and people who understand the complete opposite of what is said. You need to understand this if you want to hope to understand what's happening.
Go to nature.com or science.org if you want science news.
Some columnists can’t figure him out either, but his motives are clear, I’m going by not subtle actions.
He promotes GOP candidates and favors right wing journalists. He engages in QAanon conspiracies on his network. He’s one of many right wing operators who started or bought social media sites.
Donating the personal maximum to both parties is nothing compared to what is essentially $44B in-kind campaign contribution.
Isn't it too late for that given the exorbitant tax bill he already paid? [1]
Short of Democrats passing one of those economy-destroying net wealth taxes, or a truly-absurd unrealized capital gains tax; the damage is done for Musk. Granted, taxes of this nature being what they are, he will likely be able to recover some of that amount in future years.
In your mind, would it be "truly absurd" to redefine what counts as a realized capital gain? [1]
In my mind, if you take a loan against your equity, you are realizing the current market value. This would be difficult to implement (especially with private companies and options), but it would close a big gap in the tax system that is primarily used for tax avoidance. [2]
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[1] I completely agree that taxing unrealized gains in the current system would be a terrible idea.
[2] The main non-tax reasons I can think of are retaining voting power and cashing out on pre-ipo stock.
I agree and would support changing the tax code so that using an asset as collateral triggers a tax event. Until then I don’t begrudge Musk’s accountants for doing what the system permits. Borrowing against unrealised gains is common accounting practice; almost certainly done by many wealthy politicians and nearly all super-wealthy people.
Hang on, you lost me when you implied that tax would be forever avoided. Either the asset’s value is never realised, in which case they never really did have the wealth, or it is eventually realised and they pay a large tax bill.
Simply put there will never be enough for the anti-tax movement. Funders of the movement through cash or in-kind propaganda activity want lower taxes and would gladly support a zero taxes.
I completely agree. I also don't think it is hypocritical to take advantage of tax "loopholes" at the same time as arguing they should be closed. That is just good financial practice.
I doubt it, but why wouldn't it be close to market value for public companies?
I don't know how it works for the ultra-wealthy, but regular investors can draw a loan against their deposits with securities-based lines of credit (SBLOCs). SBLOCs have a limit smaller than the total value of your portfolio, but your collateral is still the current securities.
I'm mainly spitballing here, but I agree it would be extremely difficult to implement fairly. I just think it is worth investigating.
> I doubt it, but why wouldn't it be close to market value for public companies?
If it's a large amount of shares, there should still be a liquidity discount (not exactly a DLOM, but something like that, because when you try to sell a large amount quickly, you can't get your order filled at the market rates without depressing the market rates).
Plus, as we have just discussed, you can presume that even if the shares are fully liquid, part of the gains (if there are gains) will be taxed, and that's money that might not be available to pay off the creditor.
On top of that, I'd wager that lenders would subtract an additional safety margin for volatility/risk.
I have absolutely no idea, and please don't quote me on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if creditors applied a ratio of at least 1:2.
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Edit: this random website I stumbled upon on the first page of Google search results for the query "using share equity as collateral" (no idea how reliable or representative this is) seems to indicate that a ratio of 1:2 (they say "50%") is applied. They also say that you could expect to pay about 1% in interest annually.
https://www.ennessglobal.com/portfolio-finance/securities-ba...
They also mention that there may be qualitative factors that come into play:
The key points a lender will look at are:
- The value of your securities
- What the security is made up of
- The liquidity of the security
- If the security is listed, which exchange it is listed on
- How concentrated the shares are
- The industry or field the company trades in
- The management team
If anything the opposite is true. Being a true generalist is the antidote to specialists who have done so well in a field that they believe they can command other (usually soft skill) domains they see as inferior.
I think the only way to honestly hold this opinion is to have no idea how mind-bogglingly immense current scientific knowledge is (nevermind the scope of everything we don't know and the magnitude of the task of figuring out where the boundary between the two is).
It's amazing to me that anyone can still hold a "defer to experts" opinion after all the hysteria is over. It only works in apolitical situations, otherwise "experts" are just partisan mouthpieces.
The geopolitics of energy and resource scarcity are a primary driver of political toxicity and state sponsored murder and oppression. Transitioning to renewable regional and local energy generation and storage will reduce political risk to humanity dramatically by enabling the decoupling of geopolitics from oil.
On another note, here's an interview with a crazy narcissist who bought twitter on a lark discussing the vision for reducing political toxicity on social media at a Morgan Stanley conference. Have you ever listened to an actual primary interview on the plan for twitter rather than a clickbait article on the topic? https://www.youtube.com/live/zpcgHK_fXRo?feature=share
> Transitioning to renewable regional and local energy generation and storage will reduce political risk to humanity dramatically by enabling the decoupling of geopolitics from oil.
We had geopolitics before oil. Just ask the Athenians and Spartans or Romans and Carthaginians. The Mongols didn't go running around Eurasia for oil, and neither did Napoleon around Europe.
Oil may be less thing, but there are others. Per Thucydides, three fundamental motives are: fear, honour, interest.
> dramatically by enabling the decoupling of geopolitics from oil.
I can't help thinking that oil and combustion engines are here for a long time. The energy density is unbeatable. As renewables succeed, oil's utility doesn't disappear. So it seems like we would find some new equilibrium.
60% of new generation capacity in the US was renewable last year, not for environmental reasons, but because it's the cheapest option. The reason this will continue is because renewables rely on highly scalable technologies that are nowhere close to optimized.
EVs benefit from cost scaling too. In Norway >80% of new cars sold are EVs 5 years ago it was -10%. Last year 20% of the Chinese market was EVs. As costs scale (Tesla has a 25k$ car in development) the same process will happen faster than you think across most markets.
Equilibrium will be established when renewable costs stop declining, this is likely to be after battery costs decline another -70% and solar declines -75%. At that equilibrium price oil will be relegated to use in plastics, lubricants, and other industrial/durable goods applications. If those cost declines are realized oil will not compete on costs with renewables and you literally will not be able to give away an old ICE car.
We can just directly convert green energy into hydrogen. For a lot of cases that is already more than good enough. Synthetic fuels may be needed, but possibly only in specific situations.
Yes and: H2, ammonia, methane, direct carbon capture, heat. Probably a few more.
Being a long time climate fatalist, I'm now guardedly optimistic about our eminent surplus energy future. If we can somehow keep warming to 1.5, we just might squeak thru this.
The latest master plan ironically admits the need for green hydrogen for green energy to be viable. A big deal, because it is one of the ideas that can match or exceed fossil fuels for energy density. It is perhaps the only thing in the whole plan that is the result of clear thinking. It unfortunately has not admitted the need for nuclear, but I guess we'll have to wait for master plan 4.
The people I follow are onboard with renewable hydrogen. The food fights are over automobiles and greenwashing.
This plans makes the case that we can get off fossil fuels with batteries, solar, and wind alone. Nuclear, hydro, geothermal, etc, are simply out of scope.
This plan also carefully omits any mention of climate change or time lines. Smart.
FWIW, Saul Griffith and others anticipate future fission and maybe even fusion, but they won't arrive in time to save us. They'll still be needed. To help with the cool down. For capacity as our current solar and wind build out is retired. Etc.
The power density of gas turbine engines is way better than internal combustion.
But we haven’t bothered with gas turbine cars and trucks because internal combustion has good enough power density and other relevant advantages (better energy efficiency chief amongst them).
Batteries aren’t good enough for long-haul aircraft, long-haul shipping, small boats and a few other sundry applications, but they’re good enough for road transport.
A gas turbine is a really bad idea for a car. They take a long time to get up to speed and spew a lot of hot exhaust in the meanwhile. Gas turbine cars weren't practical cars at all.
I will argue that the finite nature of battery related materials, plus their weight, is a major impediment against all-battery powered cars in road transport. They are not "good enough" except as a stopgap until the next idea comes around. Which ironically could just be synthetic fuels, but more likely something like a hydrogen fuel cell car.
They don't actually require platinum. Only some types. And even then, it is basically the catalytic converter in terms of platinum needed. It is also 100% recyclable already.
No, since sometimes it is also just iron or whatever. Not to mention that a catalyst is a surface, not a volume. You can get away with atom-thick layers of catalysts. Which is why even with platinum you only need a few grams of it. Cost of that is significantly less than a large mass of other materials.
Moving from fossil fuel to renewables doesn't eliminate geopolitics. It only shifts power. For example, here was some other news of the day[1]. Shifting power from Saudi Arabia to China probably won't be much of an improvement if it even is one.
> If renewables are the solution to our energy problems, I like to think kindness and tolerance might be the solution to our political problems. Perhaps he could publish a master plan for that, too.
What's your basis for thinking that? If anything I'd say the weaponisation of "kindness and tolerance" to the point that it drowns out speaking the truth and calling out bad behaviour is the biggest problem with our politics.
(And as far as I can see Musk has removed the single most toxic influence on our politics by buying Twitter; even if the discourse on there is now worse than it was before, the benefit from real politicians no longer taking it seriously vastly outweighs any possible costs)
Refraining from ever saying anything against a person's political views is genuinely kindness, or at least it's hard to argue that it isn't. It just does more harm in other ways.
The redefinition of tolerance to mean deference to other people's absurd views is a travesty IMO, but that battle has already been lost.
In any case this "easy answer" is useless in practice; arguing that these policies are unkind or intolerant at best gets you debating semantics, and is usually even less effective than that.
- Refraining from ever saying anything against a person's political views is not kindness. It's possible to disagree kindly, which is indeed the point at issue here
- "The redefinition of tolerance" that you mention is not tolerance, but a convenient misdirection for politicians and other talking heads to use when justifying their demonisation of whichever outgroup is currently the target. The choice is presented as either maintaining the status quo at the expense of the minority, or this twisted phantom version of tolerance that is worse for everyone, thereby shutting down honest respectful discussion.
Weaponized “kindness” sounds a little bit oxymoronic to me, would what’s being weaponized not be closer to “niceness”?
Unless it’s second-order / indirect through people meaning well.
People thought he was in their tribe. Maybe he was. But now he's tribeless. So he's the outgroup and thus bad. That's literally the basis. I wish it were deeper, but it's not.
I mean Obama was just a strong choice, and what exactly was the alternative when Clinton and Biden ran? Honestly, not casting a completely insane vote doesn't mean much.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. A hardcore Republican votes for Republican candidates, of which there was reasonably popular versions of for each election. I wasn’t claiming he was a Democrat, just that he wasn’t a “hardcore Republican”.
I was just assuming you could be "hardcore" and still somewhat pragmatic or reasonable, but I'm with ya. (eg.: I'm "hardcore pro-science", but I wouldn't vote for someone I thought was a pro-science evil person. This example doesn't compare to what we're talking about, it's just to illustrate my own point in this comment.)
I'd argue that most people don't think, period... haha.
I totally know what you mean, and the key is whether someone has the ability to be critical about and vary their own default position, if you will. This can be very difficult to ascertain, because it's often a matter of counter-factuals.
Playing devil’s advocate because I agree with you, but there are plenty of people who would have said:
“I mean McCain/Romney was just a strong choice, and what was the alternative (to voting for Trump) when Clinton and Biden ran? Honestly, not casting a completely insane vote (for Clinton or Biden) doesn’t mean much”.
Granted there does seem to have been a division between McCain/Romney voters and Trump voters.
McCain and Romney would not be my preference, but they're not even remotely in the same universe/category/crazy-league/game as Trump. For me it has little to do with affiliation to any of your political parties in the US (not my fight, I'm Canadian). I cannot see a reasonable and/or decent person of moral competence casting a vote for Trump.
> I cannot see a reasonable and/or decent person of moral competence casting a vote for Trump.
This is an extremely bigoted statement. It's highly ironic, given the morally superior position you are assuming for yourself, that you don't appear able to see that.
I'm very comfortable staying on this side of History.
It's a fallacy to think that every choice in every situation is reasonable. More than one choice can be reasonable at the same time, but some choices are patently unreasonable.
You are saying that every person who voted for Trump is an unreasonable and/or morally deficient person. It is highly arrogant to put yourself in the position to make that call and, as I've already said, only demonstrates a bigoted mindset on your part (that you think you can universally define such a large group of people as inferior based on a single, and very shallow determinant).
> It is highly arrogant to put yourself in the position to make that call
I don't disagree, but it is my position in this case.
There are only a small handful of politicians around the whole world for which I would make this judgment. I feel the need to emphatically highlight that I would not make this judgment for >90% of conservative politicians in the world, and that my view on this is not centred on America or any of its parties.
Take a given single issue that is a flash point between liberals and conservatives. As a liberal you can say it’s unreasonable. A conservative can see it as completely reasonable and logical.
Furthermore what one country’s liberals can see as unreasonable can be considered quite reasonable by another country’a liberals.
It’s really nuanced. For what it’s worth I think Trump is the worst and most embarrassing President in the history of the US. I have friends and family on the conservative side who voted for McCain and Romney who likewise think so and held their noses to vote for Clinton and Biden.
But at the same time I can see why someone would have reasonably voted for Trump. I completely disagree with them. Very little parts of my life, desires, and visions for the future of this country (or the world in general) intersects with theirs. I hope the vast majority of their vision for humanity never comes to pass. But I can still see their reasons.
Just to clarify what I mean when I use words like "reasonable", "patently unreasonable", or "correct"...
- "correct" / "incorrect": for objective questions with no wiggle room. 2+2=4 is correct. Correctness, when applicable, only allows one answer.
- "patently unreasonable": for something to be "patently unreasonable", there has to be no apparent or articulated line of reasoning which can lead to the conclusion. It may not be possible or feasible to prove incorrectness. It is patently unreasonable to vote for anyone for no reason, but it cannot be said to be incorrect. It is patently unreasonable to vote for a political party just because that's what your family does, or to engage with politics as if it were a mere spectator sport, but it cannot be said to be incorrect.
- "reasonable": without any regard for whether you would come to the same conclusion, something is reasonable if there exists at least one line of reasoning which can justify the conclusion. Reasonableness, when applicable, allows for multiple answers. Even when a better answer exists, an inferior answer can be reasonable.
I am able to say things like "it is reasonable to vote for a political party I do not like", and "it is patently unreasonable to vote for my favourite party in a given situation".
---
> Take a given single issue that is a flash point between liberals and conservatives. As a liberal you can say it’s unreasonable. A conservative can see it as completely reasonable and logical.
Given the definitions above (which are roughly the same as used by judges in admin law, I'm not just making stuff up here), the liberal person in your example is not being reasonable, and the conservative person is probably failing to distinguish between reasonableness and correctness.
Worth noting these aren't ideals or visions, nor are they really specific to Telsa or Musk. This is a summary of the common consensus that the entire world is working towards and has been for a while.
This is just putting a set of numbers to it and summarising why the experts believe it's possible.
Entire countries have adopted national economic strategies based on this stuff. It's not coming out of leftfield as a big surprise to anyone paying attention.
yes. there is environmental sustainability and then there is social sustainability.
nobody wants to live in a carbon free world if every company is as abusive as Tesla to its employees. and that culture came from Musk himself. the way he treats people does not make for sustainable relationships.
I don't think Tesla anything so particularly bad, globally, in terms of employee treatment that it would prevent it from playing a large role in a carbon-free transformation... look at the stuff we'd be replacing in this.
Tesla the org will outlive Elon. We thank him for his exceptional efforts to accelerate the transition to clean energy and mobility, personal issues and poor behavior aside that need no mention. Just as people like him squeeze others to get as much as they can, we should hope for the same: the largest amount of progress delivered at the lowest amount of harm caused until he’s moved on. “The impossible delivered merely late.”
It’s about maintaining everything in tension sustainably. No excuses, there are no heroes.
(early Tesla investor because climate change is existential, no current exposure, none planned)
Actually Musk was not the founder of Tesla, nor is Tesla likely to be a major car maker in the future. It is basically a terrible car maker know for its poor quality, on par with Chrysler and the like. It is likely destined to be own by some other car company eventually.
> nobody wants to live in a carbon free world if every company is as abusive as Tesla to its employees.
I don't see that at all. I mean, by any reasonable standard Tesla is... just another employer. It's true that the tenor of the discussion around them is quite frankly batshit. But... they're just a company. Every big corporation has a laundry list of terrible accusations, that's just the way capitalism works.
I mean, take Musk and all his nonsense off the board and tell me if you really believe Tesla is a worse place to work at than Walmart or FedEx or UnitedHealth or wherever. I just don't see it.
So... yeah. Bring on the carbon-free world of occasionally abusive capitalist overlords, please.
I thought HN of all place is free of faked outrage or ignorance?
Even if Starship was the dirtiest of a rocket (it isn’t), a rocket flight is only as dirty as a B777 flight, thousands of them happening everyday.
Try this exercise. Measure how much carbon incurred by an activity that you absolutely love, such as playing video game, and see how much you could contribute by not doing it. A lot of activities is worth doing, even if there is inevitably carbon cost, even if you don’t think it’s worth it.
Fuel is one of the cheapest portions of launching a rocket. There’s much bigger problems to solve on that front until they start launching commonly. Once they do then moving to sustainable methane won’t be an issue.
Also what’s the alternative right now? Hydrogen made from the same methane by steam reformation? We don’t even have long range aircraft running on anything but jet fuel, which is more polluting than methane.
Nothing about Starship is incompatible with carbon neutral fuels.
The point of Starship is Mars; Mars cannot be done with Starship in the absence of a box that fits in its own cargo bay, and which takes in sunlight, CO2, and water, and outputs methane and oxygen.
Fortunately some French scientists figured that out how to do that 126 years ago.
They are spooling up commercial passenger rocket flights (for cross-continent travel) in 5 years and won't likely have renewable sources by then, they have already put in or filed to put it pipelines for petro industry gas sources in Texas.
They gave the timeline for entering passenger service competing with long haul aviation back in 2018, sayijg within a decade. Years later they reconfirmed that timeline.
You're willing to buy his estimate for a timeline about a thing you don't like (I've seen him talk, even he knows his timelines are optimistic, and he shows much the same optimism about FSD) while totally ignoring the thing invented before any living human was born and which is already deployed in various places?
Well first off, that's Elon time dates, and secondly even if you take it at face value, 5 years does seem reasonable to me for when substantial carbon neutral methane may start getting made.
> , 5 years does seem reasonable to me for when substantial carbon neutral methane may start getting made.
Like this?
> All Tesla Supercharger stations in regions affected by California power outages will have Tesla Powerpacks within next few weeks. Just waiting on permits.
And:
> Over time, almost all [superchargers] will disconnect from the electricity grid.
> Tesla Supercharger will over time allow you to travel anywhere on pure sunlight for free
It really doesn't make sense to disconnect them from the grid if they aren't next to tons of solar, their physical footprint often isn't big enough to capture enough.
Other than a few very high profile lawsuits I don’t get where the idea comes from that Tesla is “abusive” to its employees. I have friends who work there and they never mention any issue or are trying to leave. I think it’s a combination of: 1. Europeans not familiar with US labor laws and seeing common things in the US, but only seeing them reported from Tesla, and 2. Reporters pouncing on any labor claim against Tesla as if it’s already certain it’s true. For example the well known “Tesla whistleblower” that was widely reported was found by the judge to have lied about many things and was ordered to pay Tesla.
Even the notable labor relations board case that Tesla lost was about employees attacking other employees with racial slurs (usually Hispanics on blacks which is common in California) and low level management not doing anything about it. Yes it’s bad but it’s not “Tesla is abusing it’s employees” and Tesla long ago took corrective action as the lawsuit has been going on many years.
So I’m still struggling if the perception I’ve seen on the internet about Tesla is just people misinformed of the US or if it’s something else.
No, but they're forced to work at other companies that are inspired by Tesla, or outright coerced into adopting the same practices or perish due to market forces.
Toxic politics being what? Seems like he’s on the right side of climate change, abortion rights.
Is it just the freedom of speech thing? What’s wrong with being pro first amendment? That right, and absolutists who support it, are the biggest reason why the left has been able to gain so much power and make so much progress.
He also seems to think that "woke" requires dishonesty, which makes me a bit sad. But then, I'm still using the term as it was ages ago, I'm not actually sure what it's supposed to mean these days — modern usage pattern matches to Tories yelling "political correctness gone mad" in the 90s, and that phrase meant everything and nothing all at the same time.
(I've also heard people call him transphobic, but the evidence they link to is a dog whistle that I'm — continuing the metaphor — unable to hear).
It would be really great if one day hackernews could have a political conversation that isn't just strawman tennis.
"Conservatives think ... obviously dumb and bad thing" and "Liberals think .... obviously dumb and bad thing" being shouted back and forth is extremely unenlightening.
Please don't straw man the other camp's political views and if you aren't 100% sure you can represent them accurately, just say the thing you believe in and give some basis for why you think that's correct rather than misrepresenting the other side and saying why you think that's wrong.
> Ever since Musk turned Twitter into a more open platform
That didn’t happen, though.
> Reducing censorship became “toxic politics”
Musk hasn’t reduced censorship. In fact, he very quickly stepped back from even claiming that, claiming instead that he was maintaining Twitter’s content policies (which, in fact, he never retracted) and even embracing artificial reach limitation (the same “shadowbanning” practice he had early complained of) as a means of enforcing it. It’s true that outside observers that have been tracking content on Twitter since long before Musk took over found that particular forms of hate and abuse (most banned by the written policy) took off under Musk, while other viewpoints (while not engaging in nominally banned conduct) were suppressed, but this shift in bias in content moderation is very much not the same as making it a “more open” platform.
> Musk is now flagged as “not a real leftist”
Musk was never considered even loosely a leftist. It’s very hard to see how a hypercapitalst (in class terms) could remain such while also being a leftist in ideological terms, but if such a contradictory character has ever existed, Musk was never it, and no one ever thought he was. Before he played footsie with Trump, Musk might have been pegged for a center-right neoliberal pro-weed capitalist with a horrible record on race relations that might manage to fit in with the right wing of the Demcocratic Party, but…that’s about as far left as anyone ever thought he was.
> but a right winger,
I mean, race and class issues aside, he’s been endorsing right-wing culture war positions on all the hot issues, so, yeah, that’s kind of how he’s asked to be seen, I don’t think he’s actually ideologically a right-wing culture war extremists, I think he’s just virtue-signalling to that camp because that faction has made naked its willingness to punish enemies and reward allies in industry, whereas the opposing political camp has generally been loathe to do so, at least openly and overtly. But, whatever the motive is, Musk has clearly made a conscious decision about how he wants to be seen, and how he is seen reflects that.
> he’s probably done more for liberal causes than any of these authoritarian phonies.
this is all just a plot to take over the world. he clearly believes that he has the best ideas and therefore if everyone could just fall inline then things would run more smoothly. i mean think about it, he has a space based internet service that he can broadcast his ideas and control information flow any way he wants (especially when other sources of internet disappear). He now has a plan to control the energy distribution to the entire planet. This is lex luthor kind of plotting. or maybe im just letting my imagination run away with itself.
Advertising before a democracy's election is hot garbage on fire meandering down a flooded road and floating with old fossil fueled automobiles in the rain. The Master Plan 3 could have an annex to apply Super A.I. to subj/objective positioning of voter options summarising candidate's pro/cons in six paired bullet points addressing the advertised-to audience along the I.Q. bell-curve. There could be a 400-word GoogleGPT blurb extra to make the persuasive case either way for audiences unable to watch scifi movies like Solaris bu able to watch Spaceballs.
It's honestly more of a grand vision of what a future society could look like, not anything any one company could accomplish. You read papers like this from many a futurist.
How about we discuss the actual plan and you don’t bring your politics into this discussion? Wouldn’t that be nice for a place like HN for once.
You really can’t stomach someone you disagree with politically creating an amazing vision and product that actually improves the world? Is politics that important?
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics.
What if his political tweets is the result of systematic thinking? If someone holds a viewpoint that differs from ours, does it necessarily imply that their perspective is outrageous and incorrect?
It's not just his political tweets though. It's also the treatment of employees at Tesla and Twitter. Pedo guy. The private detectives. Selling stuff that doesn't work. All that stuff.
Maybe, like most of us, he sometimes fails to meet his personal standards, and regrets some of the things he does, but I've personally lost confidence that this is the case.
You don't call someone "pedo guy" without evidence if you are trying to avoid toxic politics.
You don’t think there’s a problem with the worlds richest man, with a following of millions, calling some effectively random British guy in Thailand a pedophile?
You think that was a fair exchange? That these insults were equivalent?
That guy’s life was put in jeopardy. Calling him pedo guy was exactly the kind of behaviour I’m calling out.
> You don’t think there’s a problem with the worlds richest man, with a following of millions, calling some effectively random British guy in Thailand a pedophile?
I think it's a dick move for sure. However if we follow your line of reasoning, we end up on a world where everyone is free to insult people more powerful than them with no repercussions.
This sounds like a recipe for creating a lot of bullies. Bullies tend to continue their behavior and continue to escalate as long as they feel like they're the most powerful person in the room. It's generally only when they pick on someone bigger than them (metaphorically) and get rightly smacked down do they learn the error of those ways. Note that this is a generalization: don't take that to mean that a smackdown is the only way they learn, or that they are guaranteed to learn from it!
I'm more of the opinion that if you're going to hurl insults/fists, you deserve whatever happens when someone fights back. It's not like smaller/weaker/less privileged targets are going to have much ability to fight back, so it seems important that the ones who have the ability to retaliate are able to do so, in order to keep bullies in check.
> That guy’s life was put in jeopardy. Calling him pedo guy was exactly the kind of behaviour I’m calling out.
I find this very hard to believe. This sounds more like the kind of thing someone says when pursuing a lawsuit, because they (strategically) have to.
The erraticness of his behavior makes it hard to believe he is thinking systematically. Just look at his leadership of Twitter and you can see him changing his mind constantly about strategic decisions, sometimes daily.
> If someone holds a viewpoint that differs from ours, does it necessarily imply that their perspective is outrageous and incorrect?
Ironically, in the context of GP's comment, this is a large cause of toxic politics. The demonization of people with different viewpoints and refusal to engage in genuine discourse brews the toxicity.
I think Elon is pretty much where he was years ago. Progressives have abandoned classical liberalism. I feel same way. And so do many people (Tobi Lutke, Tim Urban, etc.). Berkeley's free speech movement stands in stark contrast with the DEI marxism going on today on campus.
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics.
I actually think he is smarter than people give him credit for, politically.
One of the major problems right now is conservatives, who are about half the country, aren't into supporting renewable energy anything (but liberals will continue to buy Tesla products even if you piss them off a little). A lot of what's he's been upto lately is attempting to socially engineer renewable energy into the conservative world, which is a tough problem to crack to begin with.
There are many ways to increase adoption of renewable energy that don't involve putting down minorities, being racist, sexist and all around offensive and acting with the maturity of a spoilt teenager.
Two of them being through government regulation and incentives which are major contributors to Tesla's success.
It's possible to agree with both your comment and the parent comment, so I feel like you could be a bit more charitable in how you interpret the parent comment.
Ad hominems aside. I am guessing you are working in the renewable energy industry since you are pretty confident in other ways of increasing adoption. I'm not familiar on the topic, so I would like to hear from an expert like yourself. Could you elaborate how?
That's not really an ad hominem, it's a criticism of the manner by which Elon (according to the commenter) goes about trying to achieve his objectives.
You can disagree with that characterization or interpretation, but it's not an ad hominem because it's the main subject matter in this context.
Ok, but is there actual evidence of Elon Musk behaving in a racist or sexist way? Because if not then this is just a generic attack on the man, not an attack on his ideas.
There are allegations (probably in the form of guilt by association), vaguely suggestive tweets (or tweets that have obvious potential for misinterpretation), and things like that.
I think you could make a very good case against that comment, but "ad hominem" isn't it IMO. I'd argue {{citation needed}}, "lacks substantiation", "slightly hyperbolic", or something like that.
Gish Gallop isn’t a logical fallacy, it is a debate tactic. Seriously people, if you’re going to call out misuse of logical fallacies, make sure it is one.
These blanket judgements and accusations at a good half of the population of the United States is why we’re in the social mess we’re in now. You’re contributing to the problem, the divisive rhetoric that isn’t useful for anyone on any side if we wish to come to common ground across the aisle. If either side wishes to make impactful change.
Already the world is moving away from the US dollar hegemony, a move that will impact our children, and children’s children if we as a country don’t participate in these evolving times. There’s numerous other examples of the world making decades-long plans that the US is not positioning ourselves appropriately for. We’re distracted by such tribalism on both sides.
The United States won’t be taken over by an outside power, no, we’re doing well enough eating ourselves from the inside.
It suggests the behaviour is motivated by the desire to trick a bunch of unsophisticated rubes into doing something they are too stupid to realize is a good idea for ideological reasons. Seems pretty insulting to me.
No more unsophisticated than the rubes that spend 20 minutes washing their zip lock bags "to do their part for the environment" and then hop on an airplane an generate more emissions than throwing out a lifetime's worth of plastic bags in a couple of hours.
I have had the exact same thought, because I really want to believe that Elon is not as dumb as he seems on Twitter... But if I'm being honest with myself, I don't think it's that plausible.
More likely is that he doesn't sleep enough and/or is getting older and/or is under a lot of stress and/or is in a crazy trump-news-cycle-like feedback loop, and that he's just developed some pretty big blind spots, like any other mere mortal.
The country isn’t really 50/50 conservative and not conservative. The voting public is at some closer ratio to parity, but half the population doesn’t vote.
I think ford rolling out the electric F-150 will do way way more to move the conservative world toward electric vehicles than Elon posting memes on Twitter. Eventually someone they know will be talking about the low maintenance and good features, and no one likes high gas prices.
As a Tesla owner, I’m not buying a second one, but it has nothing to do with politics. The promised features of the car haven’t materialized and other manufacturers are much closer to the type of self driving that matters to me, hands off the wheel, I can do something else when I’m in traffic jams. That said, none of my friends who are proud conservatives would ever buy a Tesla, they revile the brand. Someone (liberal) in my family pointed to Elon’s antics as the reason they chose a mustang e. If he’s a genius at social engineering Tesla into the conservative brain, I haven’t seen any results in my little slice of the world. Not sure what’s happening in the rest.
Strange. Where are you all located? I'm in a conservative state, and I don't hear any anymosity against Tesla vehicles. The only gripes I get from all the conservatives I know about Tesla vehicles is that they cost too much for them.
FWIW and anecdotally, I'm in Canada and while I'm seeing a tremendous explosion of Tesla vehicles on the road, at least 80% of the people I speak to seem to think Elon is the devil incarnate.
(I 100% agree that he should be criticized for a lot of things, but nuance is not trending apparently.)
> I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics. I fear that the major short term risk to humanity is not the environment, but toxic politics.
Elon Musk is not (and never has been) a politician. What exactly do you think he should do differently?
I just wish the guy in charge could apply the same systematic thinking to his approach to politics. I fear that the major short term risk to humanity is not the environment, but toxic politics.
If renewables are the solution to our energy problems, I like to think kindness and tolerance might be the solution to our political problems. Perhaps he could publish a master plan for that, too.