Whatever you might think abut his stupid car tunnel, or his baby’s ridiculous name, or even his unwelcome attempts to insert himself into the rescue of a group of Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, you’ve got to give Elon Musk credit for one thing: he’s also a huge jackass on Twitter, perpetually tweeting “politically incorrect” quips like the aging edgelord he apparently thinks he is.
Musk’s highly improbable gender-neutral-friend — the musician Grimes –gets fed up with his Twitter nonsense like the rest of us. The style icon took him to the virtual woodshed some months back for an confusingly unfunny tweet mocking trans folks for having the temerity to want to be addressed with the pronouns that are most appropriate for their gender identity.
And then there was the whole red pill fiasco, in which Musk ended up being told to fuck off by none other than one of the inventors of the now sadly ruined metaphor.
You might wonder why or how Grimes manages to put up with what I imagine must be unending bullshit from that guy. But for whatever reasons they not only remain together; Grimes is willing to defend him on social media.
Last night Grimes posted a video of “sword dancing” on TikTok, but some of the commenters weren’t interested in discussing the artistry. Nope.
“GRIMESSS. HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS AND ACTIVELY SLEEPING WITH THE MAN WHO [IS LITERALLY DESTROYING] THE PLANET AND HUMANITY,” one commenter demanded,.
Grimes replied by singing his praises. Dear sweet Elon isn’t destroying the world; he’s trying to save it. “His whole career is about making travel/house power etc. sustainable and green,” Grimes wrote. “It’s worth a deep dive.”
(Though preferably not in the tiny submarine Musk wanted to use to rescue those soccer players in the cave.)
Another commenter asked a question that you never want to hear asked of someone you love: “Bestie, can you confirm he’s not a men’s rights activist? Some people online have been saying that & I’m concerned.”
“He’s not,” Grimes replied, “Def he’s been very immature at points on Twitter but for ex the president of spaceX is a woman, as is his right hand at Neuralink etc.”
I’ve been thinking about that response and I have to say that “he’s been very immature” is probably the best defense one could possibly give for someone who’s started to sound like an MRA. That at least suggests he’s not some unreconsructed misogynist but rather a dickhead going through a phase. A phase that, like all phases, has a possible ending date.
That is, if he’s capable of changing, If it turns out to be more than a phase and more like a deeply entrenched personality defect the only advice I have for Grimes is to GET OUT and take your swords and your weirdly named baby with you.
H/T — TakedownMRAs
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I don’t know about the quality of Tesla cars, but I’m not a fan of combining “hey, we’re part of the green revolution” with the sale of products at largely inaccessible prices. If Tesla had a monopoly on the electric car market (good thing not), how many people could afford one?
Incidentally, three out of eight households on my street now have electric cars. My parents started it with their little Mitsubishi MiEV, then came the Nissan Leaf across from us, and now the newish couple down the street have a hybrid Mitsubishi, but a large van-type one.
So, my exhaustive survey of lower-middle- to middle-class inhabitants of a small street in a between-city-and-suburb municipality of Montreal has revealed that 0% own a Tesla. 🙂
@Ohlmann:
Maybe. But it seems like nobody at Tesla can say no to Musk, whereas with SpaceX I get the impression that Gwynne Shotwell is much more in control, and she appears to be respected by people who follow the company closely.
THE BEST riposte to “The Cold Equations” is this:
http://corabuhlert.com/2020/03/18/the-cold-crowdfunding-campaign/
(free ebook if you want it too)
The original author wanted to save the girl, but Campbell insisted in his fascist SWM way that the set up and ending be as nonsensical as they are.
“SWM”?
GSS:
My favorite bit in the ‘comment section’ was the person who mentioned how shoddy the zero margin thing was from an engineering standpoint.
Like, yes, reducing excess is important, but reasonable factors of safety and margins are equally (and often more) important! Depending on application, the FOS can grow or shrink, but exactly 1 is unbelievably bad engineering for anything but playing poly-bridge.
I don’t think I’d like the original much.
When the Eagle landed on the moon, they had less than 15 seconds of fuel left. That’s tight even by the “every excess gram of fuel is 30 seconds less breathing time” standards.
Mind – pilots are an odd lot, Navy pilots especially. Theres a certain amount of pride in landing on fumes and good wishes.
@gss ex-noob, contrapangloss
I love the crowdfunded story, but hadn’t read the original, so I went to read it… I don’t buy it. He couldn’t find 110 pounds of shit to toss out the airlock instead of her? Not a single bulkhead panel or the door of the closet or anything at ALL to rip out? I don’t buy it.
Even granting all that and all the ridiculous set up and everything, I wouldn’t even be convinced that some people wouldn’t say, “ok, here’s how you tell the computer to decelerate and if you run into trouble, press this button to call Captain D and he’ll walk you through it, I’m chucking myself out the airlock now instead of committing murder, byeeeeeee!”
@Big titty demon : that being said, I would absolutely not fault the pilot to refuse to suicide to not murder someone either.
But yes, either there’s a way to save her, or someone fucked up massively.
The problem of saying that “the moon mission had 15s left of fuel” or “they don’t have the margin to do that because it’s expensive” is that it basically admit that the crew is FUBAR if anything bad happen. Which is unacceptable in general, moon mission included, but especially unacceptable for routine transport like bringing vaccines to a mission.
(and, yes, maybe the moon mission had almost nil margin. That make them gits, not heroes)
@Ohlmann
Yes, if in the actual life/death no other options situation (which again I just don’t believe to be the case in a ship big enough to walk across and have a dedicated closet, clearly also with an artificial gravity generator, why not toss that out, gotta be heavy machinery and he’s not gonna die of microgravity in a few hours… but I digress) I would not judge a person for choosing not to chuck themselves out. I’m just saying I don’t think that ending is the only ending even granting every single ridiculous contrivance.
Someone just wanted to make a point about having to live (or not) with the consequences of poorly-thought-through decisions. I just feel it’s poorly done when the story isn’t even well-thought through.
Something to remember about the Apollo landings. Running out of fuel on the descent stage didn’t mean the LEM would crash, it just meant they would have to fire the ascent engine and abort to orbit. So they’d miss out on landing, but they wouldn’t necessarily die.
They had some remarkable redundancy in the LEM. They even took jump leads so they could manually trigger the ascent engine if the control systems failed. That nearly happened when they broke the switch that starts the engine. But Buzz Aldrin was able to save the day by sticking a pen in the hole. He still has the pen.
Another issue with the fuel situation is that the LEM pilots landed much more gently than envisaged. The legs of the LEM contained one way shock absorbers. So they had quite a lot of margin for rougher landings. But only on one mission did they come down hard enough to collapse the legs. That’s why Neil Armstrong had to jump down from the ladder on Apollo 11.
Explained like that, it make more sense.
A lot of people have no idea of how redundant and/or overkill a lot of system are. Then again, they underestimate how bad it quickly get without redundance.
They prepared for every contingency.
There was actually a movie adaptation of the Cold Equations where the pilot and the stowaway did just that. Unfortunately, in the time it took them to gather enough crap to eject out of the airlock to lighten the load, the ship had been driven off course to the point where they STILL needed to eject a stowaway’s worth of mass, even after ripping out everything they could.
epitome: yes, there’s more and less expensive electric cars. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Tesla has quite clearly pushed the speed of adoption of electric cars — they’re the biggest electric car manufacturer, but more importantly, other manufacturers have been forced to finally actually offer decent electric cars, because Tesla has been grabbing a lot of the more profitable parts of the market.
ohlmann: obviously Tesla owners don’t value the same things you value in a car. And I have absolutely no idea what skeletons you think there might be in SpaceX’s closets. They quite regularly demonstrate the ability to put payloads into the right orbit, and they do so at a low price. What more do you want?
Musk, like Jobs before him, has a strong vision, is a total asshole about it, is an idiot about a bunch of things, gets idolized and hated by various commenters on the internet. And somehow this supposedly affects whether the product is good or not.
@numerobis : I don’t buy it. Tesla owners are just as interested as anyone else in basic security feature, so they should not buy Tesla. The idea electric cars were shitty before or that Tesla is pushing electric adoption more look like ad hoc justification than anything.
Except if your point is that all Tesla owners are dark nihilists hoping to play the most complicated roulette russe game of the world, of course, since a good portion of the flaws are related to basic security.
Regardless of what you say, the main problem with Tesla cars is, in that order :
Point 1 & 2 are linked to 3, but there’s plenty of assholes that don’t also are a public danger.
@BigTD: That’s exactly what my indignant high school English class said upon reading it. Unbolt and throw out the seats. Toss out everything except the two people and the necessary instruments. Strip down to their undies and throw out their clothes, any food, most of the water… We came up with a very long list.
But editor John W. Campbell was all about the straight white manly engineer men running everything and making the hard choices, and who cares about teenage girls, they are dumb and icky. So he forced the writer to come up with the dumbass empty closet (?), no lock on the spaceship door (?), no guard, no warning signs, no checking the closet before takeoff. Not to mention having the extra weight on board would have *already* thrown off the trajectory, so they’re both gonna die anyway and the planet doesn’t get their serum. (sad trombone)
Ever since, badly socialized boys and men have treated it as a Deep Truth right up there with the rest of the right-wing crap we make fun of here, and all the sensible people just wonder why that spaceship company were such terrible engineers and had no contingency plans.
Please note the names and initials of many people in the “comment section”. They are directly relevant.
@Ohlmann:
Volvo cars are generally reputed to be the safest of them all; it’s only a slight extension of your argument to say that nobody should buy any car brands other than Volvo. And yet they do.
Clearly, safety of the car is but one of multiple considerations that buyers trade off against one another when deciding which car to buy, and clearly, sometimes even non-daredevils will choose a slightly increased risk of injury or death in exchange for other things.
Note that driving is one of the most hazardous activities people routinely perform; for those not in hazardous jobs or prone to riskier hobbies such as skydiving, it is generally the most hazardous routine activity they perform. Any time someone drives somewhere they could have walked, or takes a scenic drive, or makes several car trips instead of one for convenience (e.g., several small grocery trips in a week instead of one huge one), that person has traded a small increased risk of vehicular injury or death for something else.
Not driving a Volvo is another such choice. Driving a Tesla is another. At least it’s not a Pinto …
A stronger point is made when you point out Tesla’s dubious labor practices. That may make choosing the brand harder to justify; still, there’s that whole “no ethical consumption under capitalism” thing. It’s quite likely that terrible labor conditions where they mine the lithium for EV batteries outweighs or even eclipses any differences among the labor practices of the major EV manufacturers, for instance. A lot of lithium comes from China right now; the use of forced Uighur labor wouldn’t surprise me. Actually, so much shit comes from China right now that it’s probably impossible to buy much of anything, other than at a local farmer’s market, without it being little better than buying a Mercedes in the 30s; on the other hand it’s pretty much impossible to survive in the modern world without buying things. The solution to these problems seems to lie elsewhere than some boycott that only a narrow, mostly privileged slice of first-worlders would ever participate in.
I don’t know exactly where, though, short of a sudden mass awakening and subsequent worldwide socialist uprising that takes all of the ruling classes and their guard labor units by surprise, and that seems suspiciously like wishing for miracles. Maybe slightly less so than “all-powerful aliens/angels/superheroes come out of the woodwork and force the needed changes”, which also has the problem that the wish-fulfillment heroes would be susceptible to the old “absolute power corrupts absolutely” thing. Even angels aren’t incorruptible according to myth; witness Lucifer. Supers often come in the villain flavor, and sometimes the apparently good ones go bad, likewise (the Jedi seem especially susceptible to this; Saruman turned bad; even Vision, who could wield a certain hammer, tried to unjustly imprison Wanda Maximoff and later shot Col. Rhodes out of the sky in a fit of carelessness) and aliens would be like us, only more technologically advanced, and we’re sure as hell corruptible.
My guess is it will be a long, slow, two-steps-forward-one-step-back learning process perhaps spread out across tens or more of millennia. We’re complete newbies to this whole “civilization” thing, and biologically only barely adapted to building them. Betraying a larger group for a smaller one (civilization for country, country for family, family for self) is a commonplace thing that maybe we’re slowly breeding out of ourselves, via more cooperative and cohesive societies outcompeting the rest. Evolutionary processes tend to take a lot of time, in turn. Our institutions are better than their medieval counterparts; those (with the Magna Carta, for example, limiting the absolute power monarchs once had) were superior to the Roman Empire’s; the Romans obviously had far better ones than the ancient pharaohs and neolithic-era city-states; and they were among the first to have any formal institutions at all. The institutions of the societies of the year 3000 will undoubtedly see ours as but further stepping stones like those earlier ones, and will see obvious flaws in them, with obvious solutions that have been known to them for centuries, just as we now know that concentrating unlimited power in the chief executive, as neolithic and bronze age city-states did, is a very bad idea, but clearly they did not know that then, or at least did not know of a superior alternative.
One thing I don’t think is the solution: any word ending in “ism” — even “socialism”. Socialist things such as nationalizing a key industry, providing welfare programs, expropriating the rich through taxes and occasional nationalizations, etc. have their uses; markets have their uses. These things, and more, are tools. Turning them into ideologies results in forcing everything to be done with a single tool: American libertarian free-market fundamentalists have a hammer and treat every problem like a nail; staunch communists have a screwdriver and treat every problem like a screw; and when the one comes across a screw, or the other a nail, they predictably make a wreck out of things. The “mixed economy” societies in northwest Europe currently do best by various metrics of ethics, egalitarian outcomes, power-to-the-people, per-capita prosperity, and even happiness, and notably they also have a varied toolkit and far more pragmatists than ideologues among their political leadership, while the US has everyone at each others’ throat and the Soviets near-starved themselves and then imploded into a mess of failed states and assorted kleptocracies. I expect we will build better societies, in time, by a combination of building better institutions, that make it harder still for any one player to amass too much power and that favor pragmatists over ideologues in said amassings of power, and adding more and more tools to the policy toolkit, rather than letting purists insist on a kit consisting solely of various sized socket wrenches.
I don’t expect that to happen quickly. One thing is for sure (and I was sure of it even then): Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the “end of history” with the Soviet implosion was wildly wrong. A famous captain once said, “we haven’t run out of history just yet”. I’m very much inclined to believe him. Unfortunately, I believe we’re in for the next extremely turbulent phase, one that will ring down the annals with such notorious eras as the Roman collapse, the convulsive revolutions that swept Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth century, and the World Wars/Depression period that occupied just under a third of the 20th century. It’s likely that many of us who are living now won’t survive it, just as tens of millions starved, were murdered, and died fighting in wars during each previous turbulent period. But the only way out, it seems, is through.
@[email protected]
Smells like more contrivance to me. Somehow the ship had just enough stuff bolted down just well enough to take just enough time. Hmmm… nope. Not buying it. If it has that much operations leeway, it has the operations leeway to pay for enough fuel space and extra fuel to carry it. The price of human lives has been designed maliciously into the ship, on purpose, an entire society built to murder, in this story.
@GSS ex-noob
So easy to be basically humane, even children can think of it! I mean the more you consider it, the more problems there are. Are all 6 men who need meds really ok with the blood of the sister of their friend, out of 13 people on an entire planet, all over it? There are multiple EDSs and clearly multiple meds on the courier, why can’t the EDS not make re-entry but hold in orbit while a second EDS comes with more meds? None of those 6 men are like “Hey we’ll try and hold out, just a few hours, so you don’t splat our friend’s sister.” SO EASY to be humane, but noooooo, cold equations. Toss her out, STAT.
Yes, I am greatly nettled by that story.
So, what you’re saying is it’s currently got a Republican majority in its legislature? :/
@Surplus
Ok I don’t really have anything for that. Totally realistic story in that scenario, 100% on the money. It’s been Republicans all the way down for the last 100 years of history and human life is basically worthless. Well, female life or criminal life, which I’m definitely not reading any subtext into either, to be sure.
Hardworking menz can expect no expense spared to save just 6 from some disease outbreak that would obvs die out on its own if there just so happened to be no EDSes available. (Not that I’m suggesting it as a moral outcome, just, you know, a cold hard cash equations one.)
Blakes 7 did quite a good take on Cold Equations.
Personally I think the biggest failing of The Cold Equations is psychological. When the stowaway gets on the radio to talk to her brother, he IMMEDIATELY recognizes how badly she fucked up, yet somehow she was completely unaware of the consequences. Someone upthread mentioned, “how can someone be intelligent enough to get on the first ship yet dumb enough to stow away on the second?” Especially when you consider a society that arms ship personnel specifically to deal with instances of human error would likely prime its citizens to watch out for pitfalls like this
I wonder if the guy who wrote The Cold Equations ever published the original version of that story anyplace, like in his own short story collection. Maybe even print them both side by side, with an author’s note explaining why certain things were changed in the Campbell version vs his original idea. It’d be an interesting exercise to see how much editing it really needed vs what ideas Campbell felt had to be included in it before he’d accept it for publishing.
It’s been years since I read that story, but I don’t recall having any real memory of it past the ending scene of the girl going ‘but I just wanted to visit my brother 🙁 ’ as the airlock opens…. Read more than a few discussions of SF best-of collections that all said this was such a good story, though. Also read about another SF writer of that time who wrote a response to Cold Equations that apparently could be summarized as ‘the HELL that’s the only solution to that dilemma!’ . Meaning that even back then folks had a problem with that solution.
The irony of Cold Equations is that he could so easily have written a plausible scenario to bring up the same dilemma. After all there have been plenty of real world situations like that. There’s a whole field of law on it.
We’ve discussed here before the cannibal sailors case. That of course, despite me spending the best part of 30 years trying to write a screenplay about it, is a true story.
However there’s a famous (in legal circles) Harvard Law Review article, that was written in the form of a sci-fi story. I think that does a better job as a work of fiction than Cold Equations.
I can’t find a direct link to the article; but it’s this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_the_Speluncean_Explorers
Threp, what Alan said! Although, you did have a really good point:
People do love pushing limits. I may have just gotten done watching a series of videos of people doing ridiculous stunts with backhoes. Really cool, but 100% not what they were designed for. Also, not safe. Really not safe. Stop it now.
A lot of consumer goods don’t actually list the design FOS for that reason. They’ll cite the design standard, so folks in the industry will know the FOS, but the average person at Home Depot usually won’t.
Because if you label a 200 lb rope with a FOS of 5, you can bet someone’s going to use it to 999 lbs of tension and then get hurt when it snaps.
Note: Not all ropes have a FOS of 5. Don’t overload your ropes, please!