I appreciate that they build this stuff for their own benefit, but I don't want to feed even more of my private info. Hopefully the models will become public or lead to equivalent models from other sources.
If killing those kids was instrumental in a greater good, only then is it worth being philosophical about. From what I've seen, they were too eager with the bang bang boom boom to actually double check that it was a valid target.
Too many are either disinterested in politics because it's ugly, or mad that their assigned candidate betrayed one of their values (e.g., genocide in Gaza). I think a lot of younger people just don't want to be bothered.
Being against genocide isn't a "value". It's not idealistic, or naive either.
It's a duty. Moral, and legal; domestic and international.
Drawing a hard red line at genocide is damn near the very least any human must demand from their leader; perhaps only exceeded by "don't threaten entire civilizations with nuclear weapons".
Same with prosecuting rapist insurrectionists, and going after billionaire's child-trafficking/murdering blackmail rings. These are not "nice to haves" - ya simply gotta do it.
If you're not "mad" when people fail to do these things, then are you really "interested in politics", or are you simply caught in some kind of us-vs-them death spiral?
In a more civilized civilization we'd be investing in making these processes work. Likely there was more money to be made by stakeholders to scuttle these endeavors.
Well, a plasma torch -> energy system is basically a chemical factory attached to a plasma torch and the thing about a chemical factory is that quality inputs lead to quality outputs. Poor quality inputs lead to poor quality outputs or maybe something blowing up. Any kind of "circular economy" chemical factory has the problem that it has to run on whatever inputs are available that day and that kind of thing will have Chem-E's pulling their hair out.
If you are throwing in nothing but rubber tires a thing like that will yield a lot of energy, if it is nothing but concrete rubble from buildings it will consume a lot of energy. To keep it happy it really wants every bite you feed it to have the perfect mix of ingredients and it's not easy to get that out of municipal waste.
I assumed that it was to ensure that the announced products were revealed in a controlled manner rather than because they aren't able to do updates to their product listings as a regular thing.
Too lazy to find it, but Dr Rhonda Patrick (a longtime advocate for saunas for their health benefits) reported that hot tubs can provide the same results as saunas -- and they are much more pleasant to use.
Not to beat my own dead horse but at the heat stress needed to cause an adaptation there’s nothing pleasant about the experience. If it’s not causing nausea and palpitations, it’s not hot enough.
> If it’s not causing nausea and palpitations, it’s not hot enough.
This is just so wrong. I use a 110C sauna pretty much daily, and I've done very hot onsens before, and I've never got nausea. The closest I've come is feeling lightheaded, but that's only when I combine it with ice baths. If you're feeling nauseous, you probably have a poor diet or an electrolyte imbalance
Let me guess that when it comes to exercise you think that you have to experience pain or almost pass out to get optimal adaptations? I guarantee that pushing your body to that level is highly counterproductive
I think that the reason you reject the claims and won’t even entertain the notion as a hypothetical is because you know deep down that you’ve been duped by Musk and can’t admit that fact publicly.
Should incontrovertible proof of the magnitude of the atrocities that he has committed come to light you’ll pivot and say that it was worth it because he’s taking us to Mars.
That’s how conmen work and Musk is a damn good one. The sooner you can admit that you’re duped is the sooner you’ll stop letting yourself be duped by him.
I’ll admit that I was duped by him too. I used to believe his stuff and this dream of mars.
He hasn't killed anybody. Nor has he been charged with any crimes.
google sez: "One estimate suggests Tesla’s impact, through emission reductions, has saved over 20,000 lives globally."
google sez: "A 2022 report suggested that Tesla and other electric vehicle technologies (which often include enhanced safety features) have contributed to saving thousands of lives."
Empathy is judged by what one is willing to freely give. Not by making someone else give, and not by spending someone else's money.
> It’s not like this attitude is unprecedented in aeronautics.
You'd be quite wrong. I've worked with many aeronautical engineers, and their primary concern is safety. I'm personally very proud that the system I worked on has never been at fault in an accident. When the MD-83 went down because of jackscrew failure, I was sweating bullets worrying that it was a 757. Whenever I board an aircraft that is a 757, I feel a lot of pride and I always ask to speak to the captain and ask him how he likes it. They always say they love the 757. Makes me happy!
Here's the deal. I feel the same way about it as you do Walter.
I don't really care about all those people who will die because of Musk's actions at Doge with USAID. Poor Americans, poor Africans, In the context of getting humanity to space are all just fuel for the fire -- just like the slaves in mittelwerk and Von Braun. You don't need to convince me that you care about human life and that Elon Musk does too with some nebulous numbers that indicate that Tesla cars save a smattering of lives through reduced collisions and emissions.
My criticism of Musk isn't that he's hurting people -- that's just what shitty people do and I can't stop him -- my criticism is that he's not actually going to do the cool shit that he said he was going to do. It's all a con.
I think they'll get Starship mostly figured out but it'll end up underdelivering on payload. I don't just mean like the way it already has but they claim to be fixing it in v2 and v3, I mean the final version that does launch and comes back to Earth will have a relatively underspecced payload compared to what he sold us as a bill of goods all those years ago. It won't facilitate going to Mars as he sells it but it will enable amazing orbital stuff that can maybe one day serve as a springboard to further space exploration.
But Mars, it just ain't happening.
If you listen to his recent interview with Dwarkesh[0] you'll see that Mars is off the table now. The moon is actually where the cool kids have always wanted to go to and not Mars. And we're building data centres in space now -- terawatts worth -- and robot taxis with robot chauffers or something?
Do you actually think that space will be the cheapest place to locate data centres by 2029? If not then, will it ever be? It seems pretty bogus to me. Why would he make such an outrageous claim? The physics seem to work out, but I'm not certain about the radiation issue in LEO. I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that it will ultimately require redesigned hardware architectures that can handle this kind of stuff, the workload certainly seems amenable to it, so it should be doable. But designing new chip architectures, and producing and testing all this in three years, on top of everything else that will go into one of these satellites, on top of everything else that his companies are doing sounds too good to be true. This ain't happening in three years.
Do you actually think that Musk's companies will actually be fabbing terawatts of photovoltaics? He says they plan to do it all in house, so what does that mean? Are they going to make their own wafers? Their own ingots? Source their own sand? How long will take to scale up? I don't see hown they can ever compete with China and I'm sure China will knee-cap them at every turn to prevent a competitor in the solar market. I just don't see an American company ever producing a significant quality of solar panels ever again. Just like America is the pornography producing capital of the world and always will be I think it's going to be the same with solar for China. People specialize in what they're good at. That's just comparative advantage.
As for the Optimus Robot -- do you actually think humanoid robots are going to be a household item in the next five years? Worth shutting down to automobile assembly lines to convert into robot production lines? Seems a bit foolish to me when you could be selling cars, a proven product with a known market. I don't think I need to say too much about the robotaxi stuff -- this list of claims about self driving speaks for itself.[0]
When you listen to Elon Musk talk about these things in the interview and you look at his facial expressions and mannerisms, do you actually get the impression that he knows what he's talking about and not just blowing smoke up the host's ass? Because when I look at this stuff, I see a con-man. I see a flim-flam man doing the interview circuit to drum up some press for his impending IPO.
The way I see it Walter, you and others are still in denial about getting duped by Musk. I think on some level you're aware but pride prevents you from expressing doubts and you're still a ways off from admitting the possiblity that you could have been duped. I was duped too. It's okay to admit it.
Did you know that von Braun was jailed by the SS because he was spending too much time dreaming about planets and not enough about weapons? Von Braun was a dead man if he didn't do what they said. What would you do in his shoes?
As for Mars, I've advocated in this forum numerous times that a more practical goal was a Moon base. I doubt I'll live to see a man on Mars.
If Musk has 10 amazing goals, and delivers on 3 of them, is he a success or a con man? I say success. So what has he delivered on? Tesla, X, Grok, AI, Neuralink, The Boring Company (yes it is profitable!), reusable cheap rockets, and Starlink. Any one of those would be a storied lifetime achievement for anyone else.
Platitude alert: If you're not failing, you're not trying.
Who would you say is a more successful entrepreneur than Musk?
Musk can be both an successful entrepreneur and a conman. Just like how Musk can be a successful entrepreneur and an absolutely terrible father.
These things often go together like peanut butter and jam.
Ten amazing goals, and delivers on three is exactly how a con works -- The con-man over promises massively, delivers on the easier or more profitable stuff and then glosses over the stuff that they didn't deliver on.
The key difference between an overly ambitious but honest person and a conman is that a conman has absolutely no intention of folowing through on any of the things promise if they don't have to. They only deliver on what they have to to keep the con going and that's what Musk has been doing for well over a decade. I'm sure at some point he genuinely believed that self driving cars are right around the corner but he's come to realize that htey aren't and it doesn't matter because he can just make that same promise ove rand over and rubes fall for it time and time again.
As for your point regarding Von Braun, I highly recommend this biography[0] of him if you haven't read it. It contains details about that episode of his life and many more fascinating ones. I'm glad that you chose to defend Von Braun in your reply because it is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. People in the space community have been reflexively minimizing the hrm done by 'great men' for decades simply because they think space stuff is cool.
Just be honest with yourself about why you like Von Braun. You don't need to paint him in a sympathetic light becauase his persuit of something cool resulted in him making a pact with the devil that almost resulted in his death.
The question isn't whether or not a person like Musk is a successful entrepreneur or whether or not someone like Von Braun was a spectacular project manager. The question is whether not his current slate of promises -- space data centres, domestic robots, robotaxis etc... are credible.
I think that your choice to omit commenting on them is illuminating -- you know they're not credible. You know they exist to serve his financial interests and bolster his upcoming IPO with little regard for veracity or legality.
So yeah the question in my mind isn't "Does he do cool stuff?" but "is the cool stuff he does worth the negative externalities that he dumps on society?" and I think the answer to that is likely to be no.
Musk like all the other current crop of American oligarchs are weakening America's grip on the world and it will have calamitous effects on the American people.
> Ten amazing goals, and delivers on three is exactly how a con works
A very cynical take. I've tried and failed at many things, and succeeded here and there. Does that make me a con man? If you're not failing, then you aren't trying.
> is the cool stuff he does worth the negative externalities that he dumps on society?
Musk's Tesla is estimated to have saved 20,000 lives. And then there's Neuralink. And Starlink, which stepped in to help the hurricane Helene victims when FEMA fell flat.
> Musk like all the other current crop of American oligarchs are weakening America's grip on the world
That's quite a claim. I don't see any evidence of that.
> you know they're not credible. You know they exist to serve his financial interests and bolster his upcoming IPO with little regard for veracity or legality.
Assuming your arguments are so compelling that I must be secretly agreeing with you is the "false consensus fallacy".
My knowledge of von Braun comes from the book "V2" by Dornberger. As for the practical effect of the V2 program, see "Impact" by King. (Spoiler: the V2 program was enormously expensive yet ineffective, and shortened the war. It was ineffective because its guidance system was not accurate enough.)
Von Braun at one point was imprisoned by the SS and threatened with execution if he didn't stop dreaming about interplanetary flight and get busy with the military use of the V2.
Pretty much all the liquid fueled rockets of today can trace their lineage back to the V2. The Saturn V was a scaled up V2. Von Braun's team figured out all the crucial details of how to make a liquid rocket engine work:
1. boundary layer cooling
2. nozzle cooled by liquid oxygen, which also preheated the oxygen
Presumably he doesn't "admit" it because it isn't true. You aren't going to get anywhere convincing people if you make attacks on your interlocutor like this.
Those estimates are highly disputed because they all come from modeled projections, not anything attributed on the ground.
If a death toll like that was real and attributable it would be the only thing in the news, 24/7, until the next election.
The fact is, it’s not. Aid was relocated to other departments and continued. Significant insider pork was cut leading to a lot of very loud people complaining with hyperbole in their outrage.
Elon remains the most effective person in history at wielding wealth for the benefit of mankind. It is not particularly close and he has banked more credibility for moon-shot efforts (pun intended) than anyone on the planet.
> The fact is, it’s not. Aid was relocated to other departments and continued.
Source?
All the recent data I can find shows a more than 80% decline in global food aid, education, and vaccinations, as of February 2026.
Education aid for 23 million children, 95 million lost access to basic healthcare, and from March 2025 to Feb 2026, an estimated ~3 million preventable deaths caused by this.
Okay let me juice you with some "emotional words".
There is a direct line from his decisions to more than ten times the number of Americans KIA in the entirety of the Vietnam war.
Argue about how it happened all you want, the bodies are at his fucking feet. CEOs and leadership of organizations are accountable for their decisions.
"Emotional"
How about get a fucking working conscience.
Hundreds of thousands are dead, two thirds of which were kids. Children.
Sometimes the flaws of someone make him completely predictable. Very trustworthy to repeatedly pour billions in an attempt to become someone he fantasizes to be.
There are innumerable amount of assholes in history that sold things we use daily, sometimes at the expense of original inventors. It is hard to cope with the idea that greed, ambition and ruthlessness are the building blocks of everything that stands around us.
Sometimes it makes me want to reject everything I know of good and human and feed these traits until they fill the hollow parts of mind with wealth, empty fame and too many lonely sunsets on a private island.
His stated and oft-repeated goal is to save mankind by making it interplanetary.
It doesn't seem to be about personal aggrandizement. He has built no monuments to himself, has not named his company "Musk Inc", he doesn't run for office, etc.
Musk does not own a yacht or even a house.
> lonely
If he feels lonely, he can message me and I'd treat him to dinner.
It's pretty annoying to be a fan of space in 2026. On the one hand you have NASA, a shadow of its former self. Clearly there is something deeply dysfunctional with it.
On the other you have an old drug addict, still functional, thankfully, dead set on antagonizing every possible person alive. (I guess dems will probably shut his space program down after they win? Can he even get on good standing with them at all after everything that has transpired?)
What do you think of Musk's Neuralink company that has enabled quadriplegics to control things with their mind? What do you think of Musk's Tesla that has apparently saved 20,000 lives?
I don’t care about some imaginary balance of souls. Leave that to god if he exists.
The ability to save someone doesn’t enable you to senselessly hurt many others.
You should read Ursula K. Le Guin's: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
A healthy person or society does not find enjoyment or entertainment in the torture of another. The act of senseless infliction of harm betrays a lack of empathy and moral spine, which is fundamentally incompatible with the role of a "savior" or truly moral agent.
The good he does doesn't require the harm he causes, so the good cannot justify it.
It looks cool and I was excited to get monitoring for the NPU on my Ryzen AI 395+, unfortunately it does not show. NPU support in linux really seems to be an afterthought.
Religious war surrounds us. The US military commander is a hard core evangelical who claims he's doing God's will. One of many terrifying aspects of this is that he's in the group that thinks Armageddon is going to happen in his lifetime and, what do you know? He can make that happen if he really feels like it.
And this, my friends, is one of the many reasons why I spend too much of my time tracking the bat shit crazy stuff these religious nut cases go on about -- because they're waging a holy war today against non-believers.
It must be emphasized: these people would be fine with exterminating non-believers. I would like to be wrong about this, but I've seen enough to know that a sizeable amount would relish the chance.
> One of many terrifying aspects of this is that he's in the group that thinks Armageddon is going to happen in his lifetime and, what do you know? He can make that happen if he really feels like it.
This is pretty crazy especially when you consider that "No one knows the day or hour when these things will happen". Jesus is saying that not even the angels know when the world is going to end, and now a bunch of people not only say they know when this will happen, but even go so far as to say that you can cause such an event by bombing countries and somehow advancing that plan? It's not just a matter of just vs injust war, it feels more like an attempt from a group of people, who claim to believe in God, to try to force God's hand and speed up the process.
This is pretty <strikethrough>crazy</strikethrough> blasphemous. Not even Jesus Himself is said to know, and I can't think of a more arrogant, literally blasphemous thing than putting oneself in God's shoes, trying to "make Armageddon happen," like Hegseth and Company are doing.
Agreed. And yet one hears not a peep from "mainstream" Christians about this.
It's my contention that everyday Christians don't push back because they're ok with the general principles of make-believe involved in their faith. Because they're conditioned to here fire and brimstone sermons, they don't question the big picture of "are these people crazy and does their faith significantly factor in to that?"
Apparently 7/10 Americans believe that angels are real. FFS, they should believe Spiderman is real because we've seen so much proof of his existence, just like with angels.
It'll make you more paranoid to hear that the Pentagon prepared an Easter Sunday service exclusively for non-Catholic Christians. Nothing was arranged for Catholics
Afghanistan
Iran
Mauritania
Saudi Arabia
Vatican City
Yemen
and there are a number of current USofA admin supporters and personal who are Dominionists, onboard with a Christian theocracy, particularly now the war / not war / excursion is officially (by declaration of the former TV host / national guardsman in charge) a holy war supported by Jesus, Prince of Peace.
Because those in power believe that the government should run for the purpose of white evangelicals -- there's a real struggle for power here. I know that I sound hyperbolic here but I'm not: they've made it quite clear what their goals are.
Project 2025 is their playbook and that has been followed extensively so far and if they get their way the will "purge" the US of all that don't belong, i.e., anybody who's not a white evangelical.
They are literally hacking democracy, and they are black hats.
At least in studies that are about a decade old now, atheists are the most disliked religious minority group in the U.S. We’re regularly linked to major historical genocidal regimes, and consistently blamed for a host of social ills. So yes, given long enough, I would worry about being explicitly targeted by the current administration. But I hope their excesses do them in long before that happens.
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