ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9mo ago
It's pretty funny how badly Meghan Murphy got stuck in your had. That debate was months ago, time to move on man.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Wow, you actually looked up the law and avoided quoting the relevant part?
I'm European.
So... an American vassal?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
and I kind of assume it is bordering on a social contagion.
I suppose sharing your opinion over the internet, and backing it up with arguments is how social contagion works, so I guess you're right on this one.
A fraud in what way?
In the way he presents himself as someone he's not, and promises things he can't deliver.
I have a Tesla model Y. It is by far the best car I’ve ever driven, and I’ve driven many many cars that are substantially more expensive than this one.
That's cool. I never drove one, and I'm not into cars, so I can't judge, but I find it extremely unlikely it's so good that it justifies valuing the company more than all other auto manufacturers combined.
I have a starlink and use it. It works, and when compared to its competitors, absolutely embarrassed them. They aren’t competitors.
How well does it compare to a mid-range fibre-optic connection?
SpaceX is clearly a real company which absolutely revolutionized space launches, and has eviscerated anybody who could reasonably claim to be a competitor. It isn’t even close.
No it hasn't. The Falcon 9 is ok, but not mind blowing. The stuff that would be impressive is still just a promise that hasn't materialized.
As far as self driving: yeah actually my model Y does self drive, and I use it every single day. The “well actually it’s not self driving and it crashes into pedestrians!” YouTube hoaxes are 100% of the time people using autopilot as if it were self driving. It isn’t, and those people shouldn’t be doing that.
Ok, hold up. They're hoaxes, because they're using a product called "Full Self Driving" as if it were capable fully driving he car by itself? You really don't see that as a tiny bit fraudulent?
Also Elon was promising us robotaxis by now. And whatever happened to the Tesla Truck that was supposed to beat rail on costs in a convoy scenario. How doesthe Hyperloop make any goddamn sense at all, and why did he lie about inventing it?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
We’ve been through this enough times that you’ll have to define humanity.
Can we not do play this postmodernist game?
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What's your definition of X?
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Oh, how about ABCD?
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Oh yeah? What about edge case E? Is it X or is it something else?! You see! X does not exist you fool! Anything could be X!
Or are you genuinely having trouble understanding what a human is, or what fundamental human experiences could be?
Edge cases, and fuzzy boundaries aside, can we agree that by the time we've genetically modified ourselves to be a blob of flesh with hundreds of appendages, neuralinked ourselves into a hivemind, or uploaded our consciousness to the cloud, we are no longer recognizably human?
Why exactly must transhumanism be destroyed?
Because it's an existential threat to the human species? It openly wants us to transcend our very nature? It's right their in the freaking name!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1mo ago
Is it because so many people have lost faith in both liberalism and liberal Christianity that they no longer care.
Speaking only for myself: yes. I'll take the Taliban over the current batch of western elites.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10mo ago
Yeah, that will really show them you're not a one trick pony.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10mo ago
Oh, FFS... are you really going to do Holocaust revisionism in a meta thread?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
I do love watching the shift from "the US would never do that, it's too risky, it was probably literally anybody else" to "LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!" in real time.
Also, where are you getting your news from, that you would expect to hear about things in a tiny niche like this??
He still believes we live in a world where when something is an issue, people start talking about it, which kicks off some sort of a chain reaction, rather then getting throttled to hell.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
McDonalds had third degree burns on her face... apparently McDonald's standard coffee machine at the time kept the coffee signifigantly hotter than any other institution would ever serve you... and what in any other restaurant would be like 86-87 degrees, was 98-99 degree when handed to you
That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that they were serving bog standard coffee, and the lawsuit resulted in everyone else dropping the temperatures to avoid being sued as well.
And as far ask I'm concerned her third degree burns are irrelevant. If you don't know how to handle boiling water, you should not be recognized as a legal adult.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
People should be allowed to make their own decisions with what to do with their body.
No. It's not how society currently operates, and not how it should operate.
And even if I agreed to it as a principle, there are many more restrictions that should be removed first, before we allow surrogacy.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
People do debased shit for money all the time and always have.
Yes, and as long as we openly call it debased, I'm mostly satisfied. It's the push to see it as a good thing that bothers me.
It’s hard to see surrogacy as much worse than the rest
No it's not! Degeneracy is a spectrum. Cheating on your partner is debased, partaking in crazy Eyes Wide Shut orgies is more debased, and surrogacy is so far off on the spectrum you'd astronomical units to measure the distance.
the embryo created by the gay couple who can afford a $200,000 surrogacy process is likely higher quality than the child the average surrogate and whatever man she picks could create.
Ah yes, surrogacy isn't spicy enough, let's add eugenics to the discussion.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
If it doesn't affect your life in any other way expect to make you wait more time at airports, it has affected your life in a negative way, no?
Compared to all the doom and gloom that everyone was predicting, the answer rounds down to "no".
Which then just leads back to the issue of your country making this change for absolutely no reason that no-one has been able to explain
There's plenty of reasons. It's just that the Brexiters were betrayed.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
From what I understand, you need to do a survey where you ask our leaders about their religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, and if, and only if, a majority of them check the "satanism", and "pedophilia" boxes, then you will be allowed to make your claim.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
The cultural grip on the West is becoming stronger, and the US successfully fused Neoliberalism and Leftism in a zombie ideology who is, against all odds, successfully working
That would be the main reason why I think the US is dying. Yeah, it's working the same way eating the seed corn works.
Though it's also true they might take all of us with them.
In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.
Corruption? My mother once told me she could never make sense of antisemitism. Every time she asked someone, who expressed an anti-Jewish sentiment, what their beef was, they'd come back with a variation on "they're too in-groupy". To which she'd say "instead of dissing them, why don't you learn from them?"
You're telling me, that not only is there a community successfully resisting the influence of the modern techno-dystopia, but that they're well-disciplined, vibrant, and growing... and you're telling me I'm supposed to be upset???
Why don't you tell me if they have a Paypal, I want to send them money.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Here's Alexandros's live response, if anyone wants the other side of it.
On a factual level, it's high-quality
No. It's pretty disappointing. At the very least he should be able to repeat Alexandros' arguments in a way that he will recognize as his own. He fails that repeatedly. Then doubling down on the whole Bounded Distrust framework is a major turn off as well.
I'm not sure why that question should be summed up as "trying to come up with a gotcha". It's a genuine question
It's an attempted gotcha because you're trying to win an argument with conservatives by holding them to their own standards.
always seems to start with the presumption that it's obvious who the "me" and the "you" are.
How can it be any clearer? In the context of this conversation one side believes in gender equality, and the other in traditional gender roles. You're clearly not writing from the perspective of someone who leans to the side of traditional gender roles.
One might as well see the conservatives who are the "you" who want to apply their rules inconsistently; inbuilt biological gender roles when it benefits them, equal treatment of the sexes when that is what benefits them.
No, one might not. Name one currently implemented policy that does not benefit women, which is justified by appealing to traditional gender roles.
It's what I've called the "rule of equal but opposite hypocrisies"
That's a misnomer if I ever saw one. Here not only would you have to show a single policy existing, you'd have to show there are roughly as many of them currently in force, as there are progressive ones.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Because of economics? There are literal communists out there being smeared as far-right reactionaries because they're not on board with the progressive agenda.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
Gentlemen, it is with deep regret that I must urge you to consider to drop Elon...
Okay, okay... so I can't pretend I was ever much of a fan of his, and given my past comments about him here, some might even consider me biased against him. I am, however, very much a fan of the ethos he represents. "Move fast and break things", regulations stifling innovation, anti-credentialism., etc., etc. are all ideas close to my heart, and this is precisely why I'm worried Elon going down in flames would irreparably damage the reputation of the entire techo-libertarian ethos, and why I'd like to persuade fellow weird nerds to give the guy a skeptical look.
I always felt there was a bit of a motte and bailey with the arguments for Elon's greatness. The bailey being that he has/will revolutionize anything he touches, that he will take us to Mars, where we will be chauffeured around by self-driving electric cars via a network of vacuum-tunnels. The motte is something to the effect of "look at how much his companies are worth", and I have the impression that it's integrity heavily depends on some parts of the bailey being true, or there's no reason to value anything he does at it's current levels. Going from good to bad:
His takeover went a lot better than I expected. I fully expected him to face the full wrath of the Powers That Be for opening it up, and while he did face an advertiser boycott, and does still occasionally censor dissidents, the truth is Twitter is a much more open space than it used to be, and a lot more stable than any of the haters or hopeful skeptics could have predicted. Were it not for the boycott, what he did might have even been a formula to turn it into moneymaker, but as it stands it seems to be stuck at a decent and stable state. That would have been fine, but Elon's issue is he had to go into substantial debt to buy it, so he does need it to be a moneymaker. This is probably where all the ideas like login walls, and limiting previously open APIs came from. While this comes off to me as "greedy" / "needs this stuff to generate money", there's one thing that comes off as "no longer able to maintain the project", and it's the sudden appearance of porn bots. It seems that nobody likes having them around. Old Twitter, for all it's faults, was able to keep a lid on them, but nowadays they roam freely, so it does feel like it's a sign of weakness.
SpaceX
A fundamental problem for SpaceX is that there just isn't all that much demand for space. The entire space launch market on Earth can gross you $4.28 billion. So even if he monopolized the entire industry, he won't exactly be paying for those Twitter loans this way anytime soon. His solution was to grow the market - to come up with services he can sell that depend on high-volume low-cost launches, like Starlink or Point-to-Point.
At a glance, Starlink seems at least plausible, but I think it will be a struggle to make any kind of profit from it. Between launches being expensive, the sheer amount of satellites required, their 5-year lifespan ensuring the costs will be recurring, and fees for Earth-side ISPs, I doubt they're anywhere near the break-even point. Elon seems to agree. Starship is supposed to be the cure for all their ills, but anything reliable seems years away, even in an optimistic scenario.
Point-to-Point is dead on arrival. The idea here is that if you get rapid reusability right, you can outperform long-haul flights by making several trips in the time it would take a plane to make one. If they get their rockets to stop rapidly disassembling, then we can start talking about reusing them fast enough to make a roundtrip on the same day. While they might be able to crack the former at some point (again, years away IMO) the latter is unrealistic, given that even with Falcon 9, the shortest reuse time they managed to achieve was 21 days. And this is without going into details like how much would the ticket have to cost, for the idea to make any sort of sense, or which city would want to have a starport anywhere near it.
I don't know if they were hoping to make any significant amount of money from government contracts, but if they were, it's not looking good for them either. The Artemis mission is an utter clown show right from the drawing board (the whole speech is pretty great, if you have time to kill). I'm prepared to lay a significant portion of the blame for that on NASA itself, and their autistic levels of obsession with reusability, but I don't think it's NASA's fault that the current mission architecture requires something to the tune of a dozen launches, in order to get one rocket to the moon. The... suboptimal... architecture in itself might not have been that much of an issue for SpaceX. The contracts are signed, so as long as they could deliver, they'd get their money, but they can't seem to deliver. There's already a big slip up with the schedule, and no sign of getting close major milestones like ship-to-ship refuelling. On top that, they have actual competition. A date that could mark the turning of the tide for SpaceX is 29 September 2024, that's when Blue Origin is set to go to Mars. As far as I understand, the mission is deemed high-risk, so it might very well end the same way as SpaceX' Starship launches, but if they get it right (on the first attempt, no less), while Starship can't even get to orbit, that might trigger a cascade of "wait, what have you guys been doing all these years?" from investors and NASA administrators.
This goes more into the realm of Vibe Analysis, but an interesting thing to look at is Elon's "Starship Update" presentations (2018, 2022, 2024). The first one goes great for him, he is largely able to sell his vision of building a self-sustaining city on Mars. The press asks him a few skeptical-ish questions about the details, but he's allowed to brush them off ("Boil-off? Pfft, that's easy!"), and is taken seriously, even as he's making wild promises/predictions (orbital flight within 6 months, manned flight within a year). The second one is largely a repeat of the first and the reception is still warm, but by the third the vibe changes completely.
Every engineer / techie probably had the experience of working with a sales / marketing guy BSing the client, promising impossible things in order to make a sale. What is perhaps less common is having the marketing guy trying to BS the very techies responsible for delivering on the fantastical ideas being sold, but I've had that experience as well, and Musks latest presentation reminds me of it. Exciting announcements of imminent success are met with a wall of silence, but that's the reaction you're always going to get, when you're trying to hype up a crowd that knows exactly how far away they are from reaching any of these goals.
SpaceX being private, I can't tell what their financial are, but unless they pull a rabbit out of a hat (and possible even if they manage it), I think they're toast.
Tesla
In theory that should be the strongest company, since they have actual factories, producing actual cars sold to actual people... but that's never the argument used to support their value it's always about great innovations that are just around the corner:
- Cybertruck!
- Tesla Semi (it beats diesel, NOW!)
- Revolutionary new batteries!
- Self-driving cars!
- Robo-taxis!
- Optimus!!!
Listen to the last few quarterly earnings calls, and it's always the same story. Any moment now they'll crack some great new thing, and it's gonna be bigger / faster / stronger than anything anyone has every done, "by orders of magnitude", but they never seem to have anything to report on that they actually cracked, and are ready to go with. Cybertruck is a meme by now. Semi, which was supposed to be shipped to the tune of 50K this year, looks like it will be lucky if it reaches 50. The revolution in batteries turned out to be a minor iterative improvement, if that. The way Elon is talking about self-driving is especially bewildering. He seems set on the idea of "photons in, controls out", and maybe I'm a simpleton, but I have no idea why you would kneecap your system by deliberately cutting it off from other sources of data. I'd literally have an easier time believing they're close to cracking it, if he completely glossed over the implementation. And as far as I can tell Optimus is a manually controlled puppet, that they can't find a practical use for, by their own admission.
If he actually delivered on any of this stuff, I'd probably be more cautious about criticizing the company, it wouldn't even have to live up to the hype, but it looks like the cycle for the company and it's supporters is "cusome product, get excited for new product", with the "consume product" bit crossed out. I think it's the hype that will do them in, and I don't think they can even pull off a "let's get back to the basics" and just make good cars anymore, because of the insane valuation their hype has gotten them. And again, they have actual competition now. Feel free to make the case that they make the best cars, but even if that's true, I don't think that's going to help them much, when other companies make good enough cars that are more affordable.
It won't be long now...
As always in Vibe Analysis, timing is tricky, but something's in the air. Between Tesla's top brass cashing out, and deciding this is a great moment to spend more time with their family, construction projects being halted, people getting fired, public opinion turning against Elon, and everything depending on a rabbit (possibly multiple rabbits) being pulled out of a hat, it feels like things are hanging on by a thread. If investors pull out, I don't think either of his companies has strong enough fundamentals to survive.
I would love to be proven wrong. If Elon delivers, all that happens to me is that I look a bit silly for shitposting on the Internet (and will also have to pay for some outstanding bets about Starship going to orbit), but on the plus side, I'll be driven around by robo-taxis, as I watch a livestream from the latest moon landing. If he doesn't, we're up for a massive collapse of wealth, call-off for our return to the moon, and the cratering of the credibility of the entire techno-libertarian memeplex.
The idea of in-group policing was commonly disputed on our site / subreddit, the idea being that no movement or subculture is a monolith, so you can't blame people for the excesses of their group. I happen to disagree, I think it's extremely important to call out the excesses of your in-group, so if you happen to be an Elon fan, please try taking a skeptical look at the guy's endeavors. If nothing else, if you conclude he still comes out on top after a more skeptical analysis, you'll get the chance to hone your arguments.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Patently false. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having confidence qualifiers to any of one's beliefs,
Oh god, you're doing it again.
Yes, I'm sorry for not stating my objection in the form of a 10 page legal document, where all possible caveats are pre-emptively addressed, but that is exactly the problem I'm gesturing at.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6mo ago
Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged.
You're wrong.
I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button.
I think we should remove both. "Bad post got upvotes" complaints are as bad as the "my post got downvotes" ones. The only function of votes, as others mentioned, is a sink for low effort comments, but if the mods are up to it, I'd say just start banning for low effort. Unlike some of the more esoteric rules, this one is pretty easy to understand, and to apply in a relatively objective way.
How do you post here so long, and keep trying to come up with these gotchas without your brain presenting you canned responses like "my rules applied consistently > your rules applied consistently > your rules applied inconsistently" that you must have seen a thousand times before?
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