I use starlink, it works pretty well, as good as cable. Not garbage.
I've ridden in Teslas. Some likes, but holy shit that drivetrain. Not garbage.
You however, have been consuming garbage media. Hint: if every other day (ahem Gawker sites) there is an outrageous anti-Musk headline or "crazy thing Musk said" headline, your media source is total garbage.
Is he a "good guy"? No. Is he "the worse thing ever?" No. What does it matter what he says or does? Nothing. Yet he is living in seemingly millions of people's brains as the sum factor of dozens of PR and advertising campaigns, in addition to the general anti-intellectualism of America.
Anyway, Starlink is a transformative data provider service that blankets virtually the entire world in broadband class connectivity, including massive amounts of third world countries and other areas.
Agree to disagree I guess. The fact that it's his project makes it uninteresting even if the tech would have been alright in the hands of someone less harmful.
If you aren't catching things like his signal boosting of literal nazis on Twitter, your media sources are garbage. (Also is Gawker even still a thing?)
- Tesla kicked off one of the two pillars of dealing with climate change: EVs to eliminate as much carbon emissions from transportation as possible
on the other hand
- mean tweets
... yes there is a lot of hard work by other people involved in #1, but Musk's leadership was a major contributor. Let me ask you a question. Rank the most evil CEOs in the world. If you have musk over petroleum companies, mining executives, military contractors, gun manufacturers, internet companies hoovering your data for the government, financial wizards defrauding people for short term gain, etc, then I'm sorry, you don't know anything about the world. Oops, I forgot purdue pharma and other opioid producers, chemicals and industrialists that dump and poison the environment, surveillance and security companies enabling despots (and the US government), I mean, I could go on.
I suppose I could engineer a worm that bricks as many connected ICE cars, and also a worm that brings the world supply chain and petroleum production pipeline to a halt, and bring civilization to an end.
So technically, you are correct.
When Tesla started, there was zero. ZERO. movement by the automotive and governmental powers towards decarbonization of transportation beyond hollow treaties, one of which had already been utterly ignored.
Let me emphasize: ZERO, or as close as practically imaginable to it. Ten years later, every company's CEO had a question in front of them 1) how are you going to transition to electric vehicles and stay viable. If they couldn't answer that (BMW in particular, who actually were minutely ahead of the curve but squandered it), they were fired.
I don't really see an individual asshole's ownership of such a large part of the world's internet access as "humans advancing". Nor do I see his attempt at shifting the conversation away from actual solutions (e.g public transport, walkable cities, etc) over to "buy slightly more efficient and very expensive cars from him" as "humans advancing". His efforts to signal-boost the far right is certainly not "humans advancing".
This is just PR for one of his shitty projects. It has no place on HN.
I mean there's not that much I can do when you just write unrelated stuff? "None of those people were connected to the Internet before" .. so therefore it's somehow good that those people's Internet access is controlled by one ass? "Businesses still need trucks" .. so therefore it's good to sell in slightly more efficient cars as the solution to the personal transport part of the climate crisis? Or to derail high speed rail projects with vapourware promises?
The things I wrote and the things you responded with aren't connected, so there's not much intelligent commentary to give.
Now you responded to each item, good. That's how a conversation works.
But going into each individual political talking point for the various subjects you brought up would be tiring.
I'm not going to dive into your misguided views when we can't even talk about the initial topic that giving internet to disconnected people is a good thing and not garbage.
It is not HIS garbage. He is involved in numerous companies. Starlink is a product of SpaceX and that is full of thousands of great engineers. To be disinterested in SpaceX technology because of Musk is to be completely dismissive of the amazing accomplishments and effort of those thousands of great engineers. Would you like to have your work dismissed because the head of your company was a bizarre jerk? By any rational measure, SpaceX is NOT producing garbage tech.
