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It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd. "Yes, he ushered in the electric car revolution, but the production carbon
by kstenerud 10y ago
It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd.
"Yes, he ushered in the electric car revolution, but the production carbon footprint is still huge!"
"Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!"
"Yes, he's paving the way to Mars, but what has he done for world hunger?"
And it not just with Musk, but really with anyone who has been successful. I would have thought that the technologists were above such petty envy. We're here to improve humanity's lot, aren't we?
- guelo 10y agoAu contraire, people that know the technology and industry can see through the PR much more clearly.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoBullshit. Two of the three items on the GP's list have already been done and complainers seem to be in denial about that. Startup industry is a great place to find tons of PR bullshit though, so I wonder if this isn't people projecting their own guilt...
- hueving 10y agoOnly one has been done, building rockets. It's not safe to say he paved the way for the electric car revolution since there hasn't been one.
- varjag 10y agoI dunno. There are more Teslas than Fords around here. Perhaps the revolution is not evenly distributed.
- astazangasta 10y agoThe income is not evenly distributed.
- varjag 10y agoThat can't be the reason on the national level. People used to buy plenty of Fords.
- dpark 10y agoPeople still buy plenty of Fords. Far, far more Fords than Teslas. What are you taking about?
- varjag 10y agoNot in my country.
- dpark 10y agoWhere exactly do you live? A quick search indicates that Tesla is outselling Ford in Norway. If you live in Norway, then astazangasta is correct and you're looking at a symptom of income inequality. Norway is rather wealthy even by Western standards. Tesla has done a great job of dressing up a status symbol as an environmentally friendly choice. (Or vice versa.) If you look at the poorer citizens in your country, you'll likely find no Teslas, and few electric cars in general.
- varjag 10y agoYes it's Norway, and no, while poorer people (like me) don't drive Teslas - they drive Leafs or e-Golfs, so I maintain it has nothing to do with inequality. Nobody buy Fords because they don't have a viable EV offering on the market. Norwegians aren't really wealthier than say Danes, who have very different outcome of EV market so far due to very different policies. Nobody I know here bought a petrol car last two years; one got a plug-in hybrid. Tesla is hardly a status symbol here, it attracts customers both from the middle and luxury segments. People who in the past would consider Audi A5 or Volvo X70 would go for Tesla. The economics for electric cars are simply much better.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoDon't look at the puck's position, look at the first derivative.
- idlewords 10y agoAnd make sure there's ice
- dredmorbius 10y agoLast time I checked, not only were the number of EVs produced and sold in the US minuscule, but the derivative was negative. I don't recall the precise year, probably 2013-2014, but fewer cars were sold in the second than the first. I can't locate the post presently, and don't know how trends have progressed. The statistic surprised me when I found it.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago"Bullshit" That was rather rude.
- Gargoyle 10y agoOr at least know how to feed their own egos with self-serving "insights".
- untilHellbanned 10y agoExactly. He sucks up airtime for quieter, likely superior approaches in other or the same areas. It's anger not envy. What's the point of Wired interviewing Elon Musk for the 10,000th time? There are so many people doing so much good stuff out there. Finding them isn't hard. They are on the internet too.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> What's the point of Wired interviewing Elon Musk for the 10,000th time? Ad money, like with all publishing. If they actually cared about providing useful content to people, they'd seek out those quieter ones and interview them too. Don't blame Elon for the market actors that want to earn money off his fanbase. Blame those market actors instead.
- dorgo 10y agoblame the fanbase
- trentnix 10y agoI read something a couple of decades ago that's helped me avoid, occasionally, the mindset that causes me to be a curmudgeon: someone else's success is not my problem. Thats not to say that any particular criticism is unjustified. Just that tearing down someone for its own sake is not good for anyone - rock throwers included.
- crikli 10y agoIf only society in general would adopt that perspective. Unfortunately there seems to be a growing sentiment that someone else's success was somehow at their expense and therefore they are owed something by the successful.
- lostlogin 10y agoI'd argue that a lot of this a reaction to the standard media celebrity. Everywhere there are puff pieces trumpeting minor successes and pathetic daily trivialities of b-grade celebrities. And when it isn't this, younlater learn how success was achieved in a negative way or of terrible behaviour by the previously championed individual. Having a high level of cynicism helps keep one sane and avoid the hype. You are rarely disappointed.
- antisthenes 10y agoIn the case of real estate, that is precisely the case. Land is a zero-sum market devoid of any meritocracy. Considering that housing is a pretty huge expense for the majority of people, it's a legitimate gripe.
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- dclowd9901 10y ago> someone else's success is not my problem. I'm pretty sure in a zero-sum game (e.g. Our market reality), this is the opposite of true.
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- rdiddly 10y agoThere are rational, non-envy-based reasons to object to all the hero-worship. For example, all the things "he" did above were actually done by big teams of people working together, but Elon gets all the credit. He deserves credit, but not all of it. And let's not forget the millions of people who worked to generate wealth that could be transferred via, and taxed by, PayPal, accruing the fortune with which to start all these projects in the first place. If I didn't "know better" I'd be tempted to conclude that the luck of being in the right place at the right time with a good idea, is the main difference between Elon and the rest, or at least that any intrinsic differences are not as great as you might think. Heck I'm a "visionary" too, just add one billion dollars and tons of free time and see what I come up with! (Campaign coming soon to Kickstarter, LOL) Man is at once animal and rational, and sometimes the rational side reacts against our own animalistic urge to designate an alpha ape and worship only that one ape. Many of us got into technology as a way of breaking down this same kind of bullshit hierarchy that you can find in so many other places & domains of human life. Technology was supposed to be the great equalizer. In some cases it has worked that way but in others it has only amplified the disequilibrium. It seems we can't escape our inner ape. Therefore is it "technologists" to whom you should be appealing here for greater reverence? Maybe it's not your technological side, but your ape side, that wants to be more reverent.
- astazangasta 10y ago> Heck I'm a "visionary" too, just add one billion dollars and tons of free time and see what I come up with! Thread winner. There is little difference between a billionaire and anyone else except a billion dollars.
- lj3 10y ago> I would have thought that the technologists were above such petty envy. That's a pernicious assumption. Technologists are still human and are vulnerable to the same emotions and biases of the hoi polloi.
- grecy 10y ago> It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd. My observation over the last few years has been a steady decline in the quality of comments on HN, and a steady increase in the number of Debbie Downer comments. No matter what someone is doing - there will always, always be a comment about how whatever they are trying to achieve is stupid and they should instead be doing x, y, z. It's a shame, really.
- adamredwoods 10y agoI think it's reasonable to express some doubt. To be down on Debbie Downer is to be a Debbie Downer Downer.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoNah, in fact I'd say it's the opposite. There are more middle if the road comments and meta complaining. The HN crowd is notoriously hard on everyone - especially so if there are technical questions involved -and it has been that way forever.
- ythl 10y ago> "Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!" To be fair, pretty much all of his companies rely on government subsidies. He's basically built his businesses around it.
- elihu 10y agoPretty much every company relies on government subsidies of some form or another. (Cheap transportation infrastructure and a workforce partially or entirely educated via the public school system are two of the larger subsidies governments provide.) Taxpayers generally don't have a problem with that when those subsidies are a net benefit to society.
- ythl 10y agoYeah, but this is taken to the extreme. I mean, Tesla isn't currently profitable and they are relying on subsidies to just stay afloat. We're talking billions of dollars of government cash flowing into Tesla/SpaceX to keep them from going bankrupt. You can't tell me it's the same for other car companies because it's simply not true.
- Inconel 10y agoI've read that GM received a taxpayer funded cash infusion of around $49 billion around 2009-10. I've also read that after the Treasury sold it's last shares of GM the final loss to taxpayers was somewhere in the $9.5-$10 billion range. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think Tesla's subsidies have ever reached that level. I believe Tesla is staying afloat largely due to investor capital, or am I incorrect? Disclosure: I work at SpaceX as a technician so I may be biased.
- TimJRobinson 10y agohttp://www.cheatsheet.com/business/high-on-the-hog-the-top-8-corporate-welfare-recipients.html http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/high-on-the-hog-the-top-8... - GM - $3.58 Billion in subsidies - Ford - $2.52 Billion in subsidies - Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — $2.06 Billion in subsidies Took 10 seconds of Googling to find that. Plus Tesla is actually innovating on a massive scale and pulling the world into a more sustainable, quieter future. I too hate subsidies but as long as the US Governemnt is going to keep up corporate welfare it may as well be towards the actual innovators building a better future than the laggards trying their best to maintain the status quo so they can extract maximum profits.
- colordrops 10y agoDefinitely. You've got bankers robbing the public for trillions, and wars of questionable effectiveness costing five trillion over the last decade or so, and then you've got Elon taking very large personal risks in technology that could potentially have great positive impact on humanity, and yet he gets the same level of hate in the press.
- mwfunk 10y agoI think that's just the medium, nothing unique to HN. Any sort of online forum where people post comments is going to be overwhelmingly biased towards negative comments- either people going on about how much they hate whatever the subject is (be it Elon Musk or Python or whatever), or people being contrarian about some aspect of the article, or people being negative or contrarian about other posters. People are just much more likely to comment if they hate something than if they love something. Also if they disagree with something than if they agree. Comments in any online forum are not a uniform sampling of the views of the readers. HN's saving grace is that many of the articles linked to are on subjects that are just obscure enough to avoid being overwhelmed by "this sucks/this rules" sorts of bikeshedding comments. Also most of the topics are complicated or obscure enough as to make them difficult targets for kneejerk nitpickery.
- taneq 10y agoPeople who like to think of themselves as ambitious and effective sometimes get a wee bit jealous when presented with someone who really hit it big, I think.
- Noos 10y agoTo be fair though, Tesla cars are an expensive luxury brand and have no real revolutionary potential at the moment. The revolution is to make affordable electric cars and the infrastructure to build them, and there are serious doubts about how much Tesla can scale to that. It's similar to electric bicycles, in that there are some masterfully engineered, high tech ones out there...at the cost of a decent used motorcycle, and trying to scale it ends up being clunky, heavy, and still more expensive than the bike you put it on. When he actually improves humanity's lot instead of producing boutique goods for rich people, then maybe we'll see more praise.
- jakub_h 10y ago> Tesla cars are an expensive luxury brand and have no real revolutionary potential at the moment. The revolution is to make affordable electric cars and the infrastructure to build them So...their plan being to bootstrap the large-scale manufacturing of affordable vehicles with a smaller number of more expensive sales, you're saying that Tesla simultaneously is and isn't revolutionary at the same time?
- mcv 10y agoBut Tesla's goal is exactly that: to make electric cars affordable and create the necessary infrastructure for them. And he does that by starting with the market segment where it's easiest to get started: high margin sports cars and luxury cars, and working his way down from there. It'll be a while before his electric cars can really compete with cheap cars, but I'm sure he'll get there. He's making good progress.
- Noos 10y agoI don't think he will. You can't work your way down from that, you have to design the product with the end market in mind. My bet is that electric cars simply are impossible to make at a $20k price point approaching anywhere near Tesla quality, in the same way you won't be able to make a decent electric bike for $300. Probably the same way Ferrari is, no point to make wide acceptance of that brand.
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- Bakary 10y agoI actually like Elon Musk quite a lot, it's just that I don't appreciate the (admittedly clever) marketing campaign around his persona.