Scott Boehmer

Tag: Elon Musk

  • Billionaires Are Not Like Us

    Now, here we are, an era in which the men of cyber industry — having monopolized goods distribution, security algorithms, internet satellites, social networks, and our attention — have seen fit to attempt a sort of siege on the American government. Is this techno-­fascism? Sure! Should it concern us that power and tech — and the power of tech — are so concentrated in so few hands and that Trump appears to be a Trojan horse for Silicon Valley’s most neo-reactionary ambitions? Absolutely! Do we want America remade in the image of a tech startup by men who like to move fast and break things (especially when most of the systems they’re breaking are ones that they, in fact, would never rely on)? Not I! But also: What is going on with this idea that humans should even want to live in space? What sort of lack of reality testing are we dealing with here?

    Alex Morris

    What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us (Rolling Stone)

  • There’s No Such Thing As a Smart Fascist

    This post is a couple of years old now, so it is framed on Ron DeSantis who was at the time struggling to launch his campaign to be the Republican candidate for 2024.

    Ronald was supposed to be that great man of myth and legend, the darkest fear of the left and deepest dream of the right: the Competent Fascist. The Smart Trump. The one who deeply understood the system and thus could manipulate it to his liking. The one who really and truly did play 5D chess while the rest of us dinked around with checkers.

    Catherynne M. Valente

    There’s No Such Thing As a Smart Fascist (Welcome to Garbagetown)

  • Can Elon Musk Colonize Mars?

    This first article is from just shy of a decade ago in 2016:

    In perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars.

    In short, Musk thinks it’s possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after that—perhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people.

    …

    Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks it’s possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s.

    Nadia Drake

    Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s (National Geographic)

    Was there ever any chance for Elon Musk to achieve that goal? Here are two more recent articles that claim he never had a chance. The first addresses engineering problems with SpaceX’s Starship. The second looks at the feasibility of anyone actually living on Mars.

    This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.

    That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.

    Will Lockett

    Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning (Planet Earth & Beyond)

    Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

    Albert Burneko

    Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars (Defector)

  • Empathy

    Empathy, the ability to understand another person’s feelings and point-of-view, is essential to civilization. We should all be very skeptical of anyone who presents it as a flaw because what they’re really asking us to do is dehumanize those they view as adversaries.

    The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

    Elon Musk

    Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy (CNN)

  • Society’s Kind of Like a Video Essay

    I thought this was a well-crafted message about the focus on efficiency, not just in government, but as a goal for society as a whole. Is efficiency really what we should be aiming for?

    A Video Essay About Efficiency (Pillar of Garbage)

  • A Second Gilded Age

    Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

    Monopolies are once again taking over vast swaths of the economy. So we must strengthen antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

    Now another generation of robber barons, exemplified by Elon Musk, is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So, once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.

    Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we must protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

    As it was during the first Gilded Age, voter suppression is too often making it harder for people of color to participate in our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

    Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are being busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age.

    So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

    Robert Reich

    From the Robber Barons to Elon Musk: Will History Repeat Itself? (Robert Reich)

  • Elon Musk, the Right, and Wikipedia

    Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters.

    This hostility to information sources outside their control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They’ve pushed legislation like the “Kids Online Safety Act” that, while framed as protecting children, would require platforms to restrict access to information deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate for minors”, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, sexual education, or mental health. And they’ve supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed “obscene”. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting “family values,” but controlling what information people can access.

    Molly White

    Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (Citation Needed)