It takes some reeeeal fucking brilliance to re-invent the Subaru Brat, only...
...uglier and with a smaller truck-bed.
But it's arrow-proof!
So finally! Those fucking carjacking wood elves can kiss my ass!
...........
Remind me again. Why did we ever think this dude was some sort of visionary..?
3 comments:
Not to put too much sunshine on your rainstorm, but what SpaceX has done for getting to orbit, and what Tesla has done to jumpstart electric vehicles should be recognized as good things by most people (including me). Yes, government help was included--but the gov couldn't have and wouldn't have done it without the private sector--Musk's companies in this case.
His more recent behavior, as exemplified by eX, er, ex-Twitter certainly tarnishes his shiny bits. Dr Miguelito Loveless comes to mind more and more.... Unfortunate.
Walt.
So, couple of things:
1) "government help"? Without massive subsidies neither Tesla nor SpaceX could have existed. SpaceX literally exists only because the USG decided to let low Earth orbit become privatized.
2) That said...the notion that LEO SHOULD be privatized is dangerous and stupid. No private citizen should have the power to decree what satellite launches can happen or not, or what those satellites can and should do once in orbit. There's a reason we don't sublet the Army to Eric Prince, and a reason that as a republic We the People should retain control over something as "public good" as the space program.
3) Musk's recent nonsense is, according to what I've read, just a more public version of what he'd been doing at his private companies for years. The "Cybertruck" isn't a bug; it's a feature of the sort of "engineering" Musk does.
FWIW, A friend who is way more of a gearhead than I am calls Teslas "A great powertrain inside a piece-of-shit autobody".
Tesla had the advantage of jumping into the EV market early, bagging a shitload of subsidies, and, yes, developing a battery that was an order of magnitude better than the competition. So credit where it's due.
But Ford had the Edsel and this kludge looks like Musk's Edsel. It's butt-ugly and impractical as a "truck", while the Big Three are marketing stuff like ACTUAL EV trucks.
So I'll stick by my thesis. Musk had some original ideas, and good for him. He also had a HUGE "first mover" advantage buttressed by massive government intervention that (of course!) as a good right-wing nut he savages and disparages at every opportunity.
He's a rich oddball who had a few good ideas, lots of help from his daddy and Uncle Sammy. That's not Fermi or Tesla or Einstein. That's Edsel Ford...
My take on Musk has stayed consistent for a long time, he is the world's most successful 15 year old boy that never grew up.
He's got a lot of energy and can be amazingly creative and focused (lately for about 15 seconds at a time), has some really strange ideas about women and how the world works, and is not very mature in the best of times.
He's entertaining to follow from a safe distance, the definition of a safe distance has been expanding a lot lately.
Post a Comment