|
I want Musk's head on a pike. It better be the next one after the Trumps.
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 03:38 |
|
|
Spaceships are cool, but yeah, I guess I'm okay with that. Quick request though, can we bump the Koch bros up to slot number two?
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:07
|
|
|
Shady Amish Terror posted:Spaceships are cool, but yeah, I guess I'm okay with that. Yeah that's fair
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:09
|
|
|
Condiv posted:nah. there's plenty of reasons for musk to chase mars aside from altruism Sure, but misguided pursuit of the wrong kind of suboptimal altruistic goal is still qualitatively different from mere selfish hoarding.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:11
|
|
|
While you might think that Mr. Potter is the antagonist in It’s A Wonderful Life, did you know that George Bailey was really the most evil one, being the richest man in town?
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:14
|
|
|
twodot posted:
Except in reality we live in a world where nuclear war is possible and NASA is not being adequately funded by government. Like sure in an ideal world it would be a government function but we don't live in that world. Similarly the Gates Foundation should be redundant with government efforts but unfortunately it isn't. Primary different being that the Gates Foundation is a token gesture relative to Gates' overall wealth, whereas Musk seems to be all-in on space stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:15
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Sure, but misguided pursuit of the wrong kind of suboptimal altruistic goal is still qualitatively different from mere selfish hoarding. It's not altruistic though. I bet he doesn't even think of it like that honestly. He just wants to do it because he thinks it's cool and wants the loving credit. It's not like he's out there actually doing other true altruistic poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:16
|
|
|
Koalas March posted:It's not altruistic though. I bet he doesn't even think of it like that honestly. He just wants to do it because he thinks it's cool and wants the loving credit. I guess there’s a question of intent, and whether that should even matter. If SpaceX’s activities lead to improved technology that raises the quality of life for those on Earth, or expands human knowledge in a substantial way, is it not morally good, even if it was done for selfish means?
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:21
|
|
|
Democrazy posted:While you might think that Mr. Potter is the antagonist in It’s A Wonderful Life, did you know that George Bailey was really the most evil one, being the richest man in town? That whole part of the plot is about George using his bank to help the community buy and own their own homes while Potter wants to kick everyone out and become a slumlord over them. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:22
|
|
|
what is good.... what is evil..... *furrows brow*
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:24
|
|
|
captainblastum posted:The only point that I'm putting forward is that you cannot determine if a person is good or evil by counting their wealth. But no one has claimed you can - they have only claimed that (barring a passing and temporary lucky break) you can positively identify evil via wealth-counting. Which is a very very different claim than the strawman you are arguing against. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah Musk is an interesting one for this debate because he's clearly trying to maximize his investment towards the goal of a Mars colony; everything he's doing rolls back towards that goal, and it's an altruistic one. He's the sort of evil person that does their evil "for the greater good", which uh... puts him well ahead of most billionaire's, true, but still firmly in the villain camp. And he still absolutely lives like a billionaire from everything I've seen, so even then... I suppose he has the benefit of exhibiting a sort of evil that could be remedied by circumstance, while most billionaires would continue to be evil even if you robbed them of their billions. Koalas March posted:It's not altruistic though. I bet he doesn't even think of it like that honestly. He just wants to do it because he thinks it's cool and wants the loving credit. It's not altruistic, but it is idealistic. It's in pursuit of a moral good, albeit one you might not agree with and not done in a selfless manner. That counts for something. He's honestly about as least-evil as a billionaire can be. He has done other poo poo in pursuit of his ideals, too - the electric cars and solar stuff were very clearly tackled for idealistic reasons.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:24
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Except in reality we live in a world where nuclear war is possible and NASA is not being adequately funded by government. Like sure in an ideal world it would be a government function but we don't live in that world. quote:Similarly the Gates Foundation should be redundant with government efforts but unfortunately it isn't.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:25
|
|
|
Democrazy posted:I guess there’s a question of intent, and whether that should even matter. If SpaceX’s activities lead to improved technology that raises the quality of life for those on Earth, or expands human knowledge in a substantial way, is it not morally good, even if it was done for selfish means? I mean, we should strive to not live in a world where the only people trying to do meaningful technical work on space exploration aren't eccentric rear end in a top hat billionaire white boys. The fact that we think it might even be kind of ok for Musk to do what he does instead of NASA is absurd.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:26
|
|
|
Musk is so full bullshit. If you are worried about the planet, why don't you actually use your billions and lobby to reverse that poo poo? He could remove a giant carbon footprint by fixing infrastructure and giving some rando city free power via solar panels and poo poo. If you care about humanity, help humanity. Don't gently caress off to space because you want to play with toys and bask in your own personal glory. Dude doesn't pay his employees a living wage. he can gently caress right off and die.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:26
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Sure, but misguided pursuit of the wrong kind of suboptimal altruistic goal is still qualitatively different from mere selfish hoarding. Definitely different, yes, though whether it's better or worse depends on circumstance. There's plenty of people who have thrown massive amounts of money at ostensibly well-meaning enterprises who were actively harmful. I tend to think Musk is at best not helpful. Colonizing Mars is cool and all, but in the grand scheme of good and cool things to do that should be several hundred entries below 'donate to the poor' or 'treat your employees to model standards' or maybe even just 'actually work towards carbon emission reduction in a sane and focused way'. Musk seems more like a really motivated child, where he can be potentially ignorant of the scope of his actions and still not be a good measure of moral action. Like, part of the problem is that exo-colonies are just not a step we're ready for as a species. The Earth is home, it is the only habitable place we know of, and it will take an IMMENSE investment to make anywhere else even vaguely habitable without CONSTANT resupply from Earth. That's something that would be a lot easier to tackle if we had a sane, stable environment here on Earth, which he doesn't really seem to be making much effort to procure. Democrazy posted:I guess there’s a question of intent, and whether that should even matter. If SpaceX’s activities lead to improved technology that raises the quality of life for those on Earth, or expands human knowledge in a substantial way, is it not morally good, even if it was done for selfish means? Intent matters for most legal purposes, and intent matters in most (not all, but most) sensible moral frameworks, in no small part because accidentally doing the right thing once by coincidence is no measure of whether you'll happen to incidentally do the right thing again in the future. Musk seems to be, at best, ignorant of ways he could be putting his money to work in doing anything but advancing his one pet project, and in this day and age someone with that much wealth doesn't have much of an excuse for not even trying to put up a philanthropic front. I don't think he's malicious, per se, but I feel like he probably squanders a lot of his ability to affect positive change.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:26
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:It's not altruistic, but it is idealistic. It's in pursuit of a moral good, albeit one you might not agree with and not done in a selfless manner. That counts for something. He's honestly about as least-evil as a billionaire can be. By this reasoning Ozymandias was the good guy in Watchmen.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:27
|
|
|
Democrazy posted:While you might think that Mr. Potter is the antagonist in It’s A Wonderful Life, did you know that George Bailey was really the most evil one, being the richest man in town? jeff bezos is not going to save you.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:27
|
|
|
lotta temporarily embarrassed millionaires itt
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:28
|
|
|
I like how super obvious it is that it was super important to figure out a way to hate Oprah for some reason ahead of time if she was going to run for president and no one could come up with anything specific so "she's a rich woman" became the generic fallback.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:30
|
|
|
Koalas March posted:By this reasoning Ozymandias was the good guy in Watchmen. Yes! Exactly! I mean there's a decent argument that, in fact, he is
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:30
|
|
|
Shady Amish Terror posted:Colonizing Mars is cool and all, but in the grand scheme of good and cool things to do that should be several hundred entries below 'donate to the poor' or 'treat your employees to model standards' or maybe even just 'actually work towards carbon emission reduction in a sane and focused way'. Musk seems more like a really motivated child, where he can be potentially ignorant of the scope of his actions and still not be a good measure of moral action. I think this is a misunderstanding and understatement of the scale of the problem. Mars isn't just uninhabitable, it's a death world, and it would take several hundred years of advanced terraforming to make a dent in that. Venus is even worse, and the best we could manage on any reasonably close body is small domed cities. It's not just that prioritizing space colonization over improving Earth is unethical, it's that it's literally not going to happen, especially when the next nearest potential site to try is four and a half years away at the speed of light - a feat we are unlikely to achieve in our lifetimes. It's like being told your house is on fire and responding that no, it's ok, the unicorns will save us. It's a ludicrous non-solution to the problem. ^ you're really dumb lmao
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:30
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:I like how super obvious it is that it was super important to figure out a way to hate Oprah for some reason ahead of time if she was going to run for president and no one could come up with anything specific so "she's a rich woman" became the generic fallback. also apparently people hate Oprah more than Musk... I wonder what's different about them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:31
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yes! Exactly! lol I actually do agree with this argument, I was being tongue in cheek. I still want Musk in front of a firing squad tho.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:32
|
|
|
PT6A posted:Let say a billionaire gives away all their money except for $50 million, which is still a huge amount of money obviously. That's a one-time thing, it's not going to do poo poo about the problems that led to someone being able to accumulate over a billion dollars in the first place, nor is it going to do anything about the other billionaires who do not give their money away. I'm not sure I agree with this. It's ignoring the fact that, if you give that money away, that's a lot more money circulating among the poor/working class and would impact a lot of people. It also comes back to the point I made earlier about how "but if I hold onto the money I can grow it and use it to do X" can pretty much always be used as an argument. It also leads to some weird conclusions, like "it's important we have super rich people so that a lot of money can be put towards political causes." Organizations should do that, not people, and it's better for many working class people to decide on their own how to use their money. And on just a basic moral level, why does this single person deserve to have that kind of influence in the first place? Maybe the people they donate to can choose to use some of that money for political purposes if they want. It should be their choice.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:33
|
|
|
Koalas March posted:also apparently people hate Oprah more than Musk... I wonder what's different about them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:33
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:I like how super obvious it is that it was super important to figure out a way to hate Oprah for some reason ahead of time if she was going to run for president and no one could come up with anything specific so "she's a rich woman" became the generic fallback. Was gonna say, but Koalas kinda beat me to it, Koalas March posted:also apparently people hate Oprah more than Musk... I wonder what's different about them. Lightning Knight posted:I think this is a misunderstanding and understatement of the scale of the problem. You're right that it was an understatement. I'm well aware of the scope of the problem, and I absolutely agree that it's not really something that's on the radar. I hope that was clear in the rest of the content of my posts. I will say you COULD argue Ozymandias is the good guy in Watchmen, by a relative measure of the fact that among the various monstrous personalities on display he's at least competent in his callous inhumanity?
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:34
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:I'm not sure I agree with this. It's ignoring the fact that, if you give that money away, that's a lot more money circulating among the poor/working class and would impact a lot of people. Also, iirc there was a study that said the best way to get people out of poverty was literally give them money. No hoops, no strings. Just loving do it. That's one of the reasons the Keep Your Head Up thread in TGRS is set up the way it is. The best way to help to the poor is to give us loving money. And all the arguments against this are loving garbage.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:35
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yes! Exactly! I'm going to spoil the plot of a 40 year old book in this post. I wanted to point out that this is hilarious in this context because Ozymandias is literally an rear end in a top hat white dude who is so convinced that he can and should be the one to save the world that he works himself into positions of power and wealth after participating in a closed off good old white boys club that enforced the will of the government and poo poo on the marginalized so that he can execute an inane scheme to end the Cold War and prevent nuclear war. Which "works" by killing tens of millions of people, and will fall apart unless he keeps dropping aliens on cities to keep the governments going with the plan and also will fall apart when he dies. The literal entire point of Watchmen is that everyone in the story is an rear end in a top hat terrible person, and Ozymandias and Rorshach are especially terrible people because they both think they're actually the good guys. Ozymandias is actually a pretty good comparison for Musk though, as far as whiny rich white boys who think they're gonna save the world go.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:36
|
|
|
What has Elon Musk actually accomplished besides burning a metric fuckton of venture capital money on various boondoggles? Tesla is producing a handful of cars at a massive loss and we already knew how to send poo poo into space half a century ago. To me the dude seems like a poster boy for failing upwards.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:39
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:I think an uncomfortable conclusion to this is that presently our definition of "wealthy" is probably too narrow. We're talking about billionaires right now, but are people who make 150 thousand a year and aren't sharing some of that implicitly immoral as well? From the perspective of the people making 6 dollars a month, they probably are. Implicitly, the majority of people living in the developed world are basically bad people right out of the gate, including most of the forum goers. There's not much we can do about that on an individual level other than give money wherever we can, but yeah. Yeah, this is what I was getting at in an earlier post. I think you can definitely say it's immoral to (using your example) make $150,000, but I think there's just a great difference in degree at that point. It's like the difference between punching someone and gunning down 1000 people. I also think an important difference once you're talking about middle class people is that, even though they technically have disposable income they could use charitably, they're still at a reasonable risk of future financial insolvency. It isn't inconceivable they could face financial hardship in the future, due to some unexpected expense, losing their job, etc. But once you reach a certain level of wealth, that risk no long realistically exists, and once you reach a level even higher than that (like I said earlier, I'd probably say ~$10M or so) you can give away a bunch without any noticeable impact to your quality of life. So because of this, I don't think it makes sense to compare the developed world working class with the rich. Cerebral Bore posted:Personally I don't really give a poo poo about Musk's motivations for his Mars boondoggle, because it shouldn't be his decision to make in the first place. Yeah, this is really a key thing. Regardless of how well you think the rich are using their money, it shouldn't be their choice to begin with. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jan 10, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:39
|
|
|
Unfortunately, capitalism by its very nature serves capital, not people. It's right there in the name, really. I don't know how you even sell enough of the right people on universal minimum income and national healthcare if the current governmental trainwreck doesn't end up doing the trick. If we can pull the US out of its current clusterfuck somehow, great, awesome, otherwise the rest of the world should regard us as a prophetic last warning. I mean, there's still non-zero odds of knock-on effects of global warming driving humanity extinct in a couple hundred years, but I guess I'm not going to be around to see that.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:42
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:So because of this, I don't think it makes sense to compare the developed world working class with the rich. I agree that it's not actually a fair or equal comparison, I was just bringing up that as a matter of perspective, many of us are ludicrously rich compared to the international poor. It's more about how thoroughly unjust the global economic system is, not just how unjust it is for people in the developed world.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:42
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:I'm not sure I agree with this. It's ignoring the fact that, if you give that money away, that's a lot more money circulating among the poor/working class and would impact a lot of people. Yeah, the real answer is that in a just world Elon Musk would be an upper tier executive at NASA. All the names we have been throwing around are edge edge edge cases. Look at the Forbes billionaires list and it's 99% horrible monster people with a handful of people like Rowling or Oprah or Musk who aren't *obviously* horrible except insofar as the simple fact of their wealth.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:43
|
|
|
Oprah unleashed Dr. Oz on the world
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:43
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, the real answer is that in a just world Elon Musk would be an upper tier executive at NASA. Musk is obviously horrible. You just need to look into how he treats his workers and manages labor disputes. He's a privileged, entitled rear end in a top hat.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:48
|
|
|
I at least feel like Oprah usually means well, even when she's unfortunately advancing the careers of woo artists. Musk is blatantly myopic. Both are definitely better than the likes of the Koch family, or Trump, or, say, Murdoch.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:49
|
|
|
This is where it started, this is the single, simple claim that I disagree with:Ytlaya posted:Simply having that kind of money is evil, yes. Once a person has on the order of tens of millions of dollars or more, they're basically iredeemable (unless, of course, they give away most of that money). Which led to some freaking out that I'm a capitalist bootlicker and temporarily embarrassed millionaire. But that it's. All that I tried to say is that merely looking at a number, the amount of wealth somebody has, is not a valid way to determine if they are good or evil, or even their general level of morality. GlyphGryph posted:But no one has claimed you can - they have only claimed that (barring a passing and temporary lucky break) you can positively identify evil via wealth-counting. captainblastum posted:A person's morality cannot be defined by their wealth. Koalas March posted:Yes it can lol. All of the posts about "well no but you see it's about how you make the money or what you do with it" are just... the same thing that I'm saying.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:51
|
|
|
Chomskyan posted:Musk is obviously horrible. You just need to look into how he treats his workers and manages labor disputes. He's a privileged, entitled rear end in a top hat. When I say "obviously" I mean "first sentence of their Wikipedia entry" type obvious. Like all you have to know about the Koch Brothers is "oil company owners" to know they're horrible. I mean Musk may be horrible but he's not obviously horrible from the mere fact that he owns an electric car company and a space rockets company.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:53
|
|
|
captainblastum posted:All of the posts about "well no but you see it's about how you make the money or what you do with it" are just... the same thing that I'm saying. those people are idiots Hieronymous Alloy posted:When I say "obviously" I mean "first sentence of their Wikipedia entry" type obvious. Like all you have to know about the Koch Brothers is "oil company owners" to know they're horrible. wikipedia has his net worth as a fast fact so you don't even need to read the article to know he's poo poo
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 03:38 |
|
|
captainblastum posted:All that I tried to say is that merely looking at a number, the amount of wealth somebody has, is not a valid way to determine if they are good or evil, or even their general level of morality Yeah, nobody agrees with your opinion. Hence the backlash
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2018 20:54
|
|