He seems like kind of a dick

  • xe8
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    4 years ago

    When did I deny climate change?

    Green capitalism isn’t going to stop climate change, and colonizing Mars isn’t any kind of solution as long as we’re still living under a system that expects and enforces unrestrained exploitation and consumption.

    If we can’t do what’s required to keep this planet habitable, we don’t have much chance of surviving Mars.

    The solution to climate change isn’t making electric luxury cars so some Silicon Valley techbros can drive them to Burning Man to take LSD and feel like they’re changing the world. The solution to climate change is for workers to build power in their workplaces, communities to organize, strike, abolish capitalism and build a system from the bottom up that works for the health and happiness of all people, animals, and the planet that we live on - not enslaving most of us so a select few billionaires can hoard obscene amounts of stolen wealth.

    “The media” hasn’t done anything to Elon Musk except fawn over him and paint him as some kind of benevolent saviour. Just go look at his Twitter and you’ll see that he’s a right wing “Libertarian” who thinks it’s funny to actively exploit workers and destroy their attempts to unionize and organize against his exploitation. He makes clueless references to pop culture to try to seem cool. He supported the fascist Trump and was shouting about “FREEDOM” for people not to wear masks during a global pandemic.

    • bartek
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      4 years ago

      You should read about S-curve in manufacturing business.

      I assure you that Tesla cars will be much cheaper and affordable than VW or GM cars (VW poisoned millions of people recently for profit and used forced labor during WWII without any penalty for doing so - it took them many decades to say simple “sorry”, GM bought battery startups just to close them and closed EV1 successful electric car because they were scared it could disrupt their business).

      It is all about cost and wealthy ones are paying premium for development of technology which will allow to mass manufacture cheap car. Electric drive train will be much cheaper in the future than gasoline one.

      There is huge lobbying going on (oil/gas lobby and Internal Combustion Car manufacturers lobby) trying to silence any reports about huge effect of transportation industry on pollution. But during COVID there was clear evidence that significant drop of transport miles driven was correlated with low pollution.

      His dislike of unions is simple - unions do not care about company’s mission (“to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”). You do not understand why Tesla cars will be cheaper than cheapest cars and why unionized member should know that? Unions take over decision making in company and in majority of cases it is slowing down progress.

      There are many car manufacturers in USA - you can choose whatever you want. If knowledge about no union policy in Tesla is show stoper for you why not just pass on their career offers and go elsewhere?

      He is totaly destroyed in media because media are interested only in clicks - and Elon/Tesla in the title with any bad context means many times more clicks.

      • xe8
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        4 years ago

        I know about S-curves, economies of scope and scale, JIT production, etc. I’ve read Stiglitz, Fukuyama, and the rest of it. I was also fed the same neoliberal propaganda about unions, and how great individual contracts are.

        Ok, so let’s say we’re all in some distant future driving electric vehicles with no emissions.

        That’s still not addressing mass deforestation, overfishing, pollution, and the myriad of other destructive practices that capitalism encourages.

        And it’s not addressing why everyone need a car in the first place to rush to jobs, most of which are useless, destructive, or could be automated if we weren’t all required to do wage work in order to pay rent and survive.

        Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world and what’s he doing to create actual change? Nothing.

        • Openmastering
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          4 years ago

          Well, it would mean, that other big companies didn’t spend an awful lot of time in optimizing processes. I don’t believe that Ford or Toyota would say: oh, we have good sales, let’s not optimize the process and earn more. Why would an S-curve work for Tesla and not for any other company?