7 ms·

Counterpoint: I dislike Musk because he's narcissist (subtypes: strongly communal, somewhat grandiose) but I don't wanna see spaceX fail. I just don't want abus

Counterpoint: I dislike Musk because he's narcissist (subtypes: strongly communal, somewhat grandiose) but I don't wanna see spaceX fail. I just don't want abusive individuals in positions of power to have so much influence and to be given credit for the technical achievements of others.

misiti3780 1y ago
[flagged]
- King-Aaron 1y ago
  The person above you is not wrong. Objectively people who fawn over Musks wealth and achievements without commenting on his nefarious qualities and blatant illegal behaviour recently need a reality check.
  - misiti3780 1y ago
    you need to break some eggs to make an omelette. it's not a coincidence that he is landing skyscrapers while you're talking shit about him on HN.
    - toss1 1y ago
      Yes, you need to break some eggs to make an omelette, but you do not need to spend more than a quarter-Billion dollars to help elect an administration working to end democracy in order to build a new spacecraft. In fact the spacecraft development would likely go better without any political intervention at all; it is widely seen as a distraction, and rightly so.
      - misiti3780 1y ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        toss1 1y ago
        Nice offtopic whataboutism tic you have there... The point was that it is and was completely unnecessary for the particular omlette of making new self-landing spacecraft to break the particular eggs of spending all that time and money on politics. They are two entirely different pursuits, negating the GP comment. As for Harris, you are comparing an exaggerated number for total campaign spend to Musk's $250-$400 million spending as a single donor to a campaign in which he was not running. Comparing apples-to-apples, the Trump and Harris campaigns spent comparable amounts [0], and that is officially, not counting the massive media coverage Trump obtains for free. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/c3613e1b-c15d-47b8-a502-400c4114c09e https://www.ft.com/content/c3613e1b-c15d-47b8-a502-400c4114c...
        King-Aaron 1y ago
        It should be noted also, that to normal people, the answer is yes - any politician wasting taxpayer money is a huge problem. It is absurd when people bring up the whataboutism as if everyone is as politically biased as they themselves are.
        misiti3780 1y ago
        I'm not politically biased. I'm an independent and didn't like either candidate in 2024
        misiti3780 1y ago
        Elon said the reason he spent that money was because he thought a Harris presidency would be a disaster for the country, worse than a 2nd Trump presidency. You may not agree with it, but that doesn't make it "nefarious" and "blatantly illegal." I actually don't particularly like Elon and I don't like Trump or Harris and didn't vote for either. I also have no issues pointing out his accomplishments. I was pointing out that every time SpaceX or Tesla do something cool, people like you show up and have to make it political, which is super annoying and possibly a violation of the HN guidelines.
    - King-Aaron 1y ago
      Does it need to be a competition in your eyes? Is allowing root-level access to the nations critical government infrastructure for his cronies and removing funding for organisations investigating his companies for wrongdoing the necessary broken eggs to land a flying skyscraper? I don't understand why 'the ends justify the means' is a good answer.
      - misiti3780 1y ago
        "root-level access to the nations critical government infrastructure" - link to what you are referring to please?
        King-Aaron 1y ago
        I am sure you haven't been living under a rock during the DOGE debacle.
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    Not every mention of Musk needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer of not supporting his idiotic self-defeating politics. This isn't reddit. Speaking of politics though, it was a bit jarring to see the "USA! USA!" chanting. I get the intent (disliking the government doesn't mean disliking America), but it's kind of awkward to see a large crowd of immigrants doing it as the admin their boss supports is pretty blatantly harassing immigrants regardless of citizenship.
    - misiti3780 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        [flagged]
        firesteelrain 1y ago
        Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit It’s in the HN guidelines
        potato3732842 1y ago
        What part of "hn isn't becoming reddit it's always a fixed distance from it" was unclear? JFC.
      - firesteelrain 1y ago
        “ Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. ” Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        misiti3780 1y ago
        sorry :) wont do it again.
dotnet00 1y ago
He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. Books documenting SpaceX's early days make it pretty clear that Musk had a pretty significant role in putting in place the kind of thinking that has allowed SpaceX to blow open the commercial space market. Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
- gtowey 1y ago
  > He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing. We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
  - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
    We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude. US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on. It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work. As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic. I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.

misiti3780 1y ago

[flagged]

King-Aaron 1y ago
The person above you is not wrong. Objectively people who fawn over Musks wealth and achievements without commenting on his nefarious qualities and blatant illegal behaviour recently need a reality check.
- misiti3780 1y ago
  you need to break some eggs to make an omelette. it's not a coincidence that he is landing skyscrapers while you're talking shit about him on HN.
  - toss1 1y ago
    Yes, you need to break some eggs to make an omelette, but you do not need to spend more than a quarter-Billion dollars to help elect an administration working to end democracy in order to build a new spacecraft. In fact the spacecraft development would likely go better without any political intervention at all; it is widely seen as a distraction, and rightly so.
    - misiti3780 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - toss1 1y ago
        Nice offtopic whataboutism tic you have there... The point was that it is and was completely unnecessary for the particular omlette of making new self-landing spacecraft to break the particular eggs of spending all that time and money on politics. They are two entirely different pursuits, negating the GP comment. As for Harris, you are comparing an exaggerated number for total campaign spend to Musk's $250-$400 million spending as a single donor to a campaign in which he was not running. Comparing apples-to-apples, the Trump and Harris campaigns spent comparable amounts [0], and that is officially, not counting the massive media coverage Trump obtains for free. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/c3613e1b-c15d-47b8-a502-400c4114c09e https://www.ft.com/content/c3613e1b-c15d-47b8-a502-400c4114c...
        King-Aaron 1y ago
        It should be noted also, that to normal people, the answer is yes - any politician wasting taxpayer money is a huge problem. It is absurd when people bring up the whataboutism as if everyone is as politically biased as they themselves are.
        misiti3780 1y ago
        I'm not politically biased. I'm an independent and didn't like either candidate in 2024
        misiti3780 1y ago
        Elon said the reason he spent that money was because he thought a Harris presidency would be a disaster for the country, worse than a 2nd Trump presidency. You may not agree with it, but that doesn't make it "nefarious" and "blatantly illegal." I actually don't particularly like Elon and I don't like Trump or Harris and didn't vote for either. I also have no issues pointing out his accomplishments. I was pointing out that every time SpaceX or Tesla do something cool, people like you show up and have to make it political, which is super annoying and possibly a violation of the HN guidelines.
  - King-Aaron 1y ago
    Does it need to be a competition in your eyes? Is allowing root-level access to the nations critical government infrastructure for his cronies and removing funding for organisations investigating his companies for wrongdoing the necessary broken eggs to land a flying skyscraper? I don't understand why 'the ends justify the means' is a good answer.
    - misiti3780 1y ago
      "root-level access to the nations critical government infrastructure" - link to what you are referring to please?
      - King-Aaron 1y ago
        I am sure you haven't been living under a rock during the DOGE debacle.
- dotnet00 1y ago
  Not every mention of Musk needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer of not supporting his idiotic self-defeating politics. This isn't reddit. Speaking of politics though, it was a bit jarring to see the "USA! USA!" chanting. I get the intent (disliking the government doesn't mean disliking America), but it's kind of awkward to see a large crowd of immigrants doing it as the admin their boss supports is pretty blatantly harassing immigrants regardless of citizenship.
  - misiti3780 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - firesteelrain 1y ago
        Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit It’s in the HN guidelines
        potato3732842 1y ago
        What part of "hn isn't becoming reddit it's always a fixed distance from it" was unclear? JFC.
    - firesteelrain 1y ago
      “ Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. ” Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - misiti3780 1y ago
        sorry :) wont do it again.

dotnet00 1y ago

He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. Books documenting SpaceX's early days make it pretty clear that Musk had a pretty significant role in putting in place the kind of thinking that has allowed SpaceX to blow open the commercial space market. Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.

gtowey 1y ago
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing. We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
- DoesntMatter22 1y ago
  We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude. US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
- dotnet00 1y ago
  I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on. It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work. As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic. I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.