I agree that Bezos should have disclosed his links to the construction through Amazon, but I also think every single reporter for NPR, including and especially the one who wrote this, should disclose their personal, family, and political relationships to political parties and politicians before reporting on them.
Right, because the guy earning a normal salary has as much influence as the billionaire that is rubbing shoulders with and paying bribes to the decision makers, and also controls the editorial policy, salary and employment of the newspaper in question.
Sometimes quantity of money has a quality all of its own.
You're saying that the rank-and-file employees of a public radio station should be held to the same standard as billionaire owners of private news media conglomerates?
This piece would be more useful if it explained what it means by winning. Early on, it seems to define winning as the amount of taxpayer subsidies going towards it, at least in the US; but then it talks about the growth in the rest of the world without showing, at least before I stopped reading, how much of that growth is driven by tax and regulatory incentives.
It was well known before Kimmel made his comments that the shooter was in a romantic relationship with a trans woman. Having said that, even if he did not know about that relationship it was irresponsible of Kimmel to repeat rumors he could not have known were true that the shooter was maga.
He did not assert they were unknown: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said in his Sept. 15 monologue.
I guess that leaves the question as to why Kimmel did not say: 'We hit some new lows over the weekend when people of all political stripes were trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them'. Because that seems like it gives more information to the viewer because that is what actually happened and acknowledging people from both sides were doing the 'bad thing' should help to bring people together instead of driving people apart.
Mr. Kimmel is making a series of jokes about how members of the party in power are reacting, including a clip of the president not seeming to care when asked about Mr. Kirk's death.
Yes but you're not a mind reader and you don't know how much of his firing was due to government pressure vs a decision he was alienating half the country irreparably - and I'm curious to know why you didn't mention his ratings had been slipping. Surely that has some place in the discussion?
That’s probably why they didn’t put up a fight but it doesn’t cancel out the illegality of the threat. If the local mob boss shows up and says “nice business, it’d be a shame if something happened to it” that’s still extortion even if you decide it was losing money and walk away.
No. "If he were more profitable, his company would have spent money on a legal defense instead" is not a valid counterargument to "It is bad that the government threatened a company into cancelling a show because they criticized a friend of the regime."
I’m not sure you’re ever going to get the smoking gun you’re looking for to make a conclusive statement here.
In lending, there’s a legal concept of disparate impact, which means even if your policy didn’t explicitly intend to harm this group of people, you implicitly / indirectly impacted them, and that also counts as a bad thing just like explicit impact.
Basically, you don’t have to prove intent, you only have to prove outcome.
…It was a roundabout analogy, but I think the same thing applies here. I don’t need the administration to say, “we did that because we don’t like him.” There is enough impact for me to conclude culpability, regardless of whether I can prove intent.
(Edit: maybe a better concept here is circumstantial evidence)
There's certainly a place for revisionist history and the Spartan legend seemed like a fair target even before Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, but it seems ironic to be skewering the Frank-Miller-300 caricature in service to his own caricature of the "second-amendment-sticker-on-my-pickup-truck" guys who are his real target.
"I just bet those Spartans would be coal rolling me in their diesel Ford F-350's with their lifted tires and MAGA bumpter stickers today if they could!"
It's the most likely interpretation toe because it fits the known facts.
Ungenerous interpretations don't make sense and don't fit the known facts.
Musk isn't hiding his intentions. He's blasting them. He wants to make humans an interplanetary species. He wants his name to be associated with that for millennia. I don't see anything wrong with that and have trouble understanding why people hate him souch for it.
- his work pracices at all his companies are that of an imbecile manbaby. There are very public reports of this for Tesla and SpaceX, at the very least.
- his "hyperloop" plan delayed a proper trans-state transportation system for a decade+
- he proceeded to further ruin twitter and be completely contradictory on his whole "free speech" advocation
- he literally tried to buy votes for a national US election. Then admitted his lottery was never a fair lottery (i.e. fraud). Pretty much knowing any lawsuits after the election was a cost to do business.
- and his punishment? being a part of a stupidly named cabinet organization that will probably do the opposite of its stated goals, given his history.
Those are just off the top of my head.
What reasons do I have to like Musk? Because he didn't screw up SpaceX as hard as NASA was screwed by the federal government? That he was first to market for American EVs (because US was too busy defending oil and ignoring that other countries were pushing ahead)?
Some people don't want to be an interplanetary species at the expense of more urgent priorities; to them it isn't compelling that an ambitious man wants to immortalize himself using concepts from the science fiction of his childhood
It ain't deep. He wants to influence American policty to get more money for whatever personal ideals he has. This isn't mind reading so much as reflecting on his actions from this year alone.
> He wants to make humans an interplanetary species.
Sure, that's one of the things he wants to do. But his actions don't demonstrate that this is the primary thing he wants to do.
You can't build a sustainable colony on Mars without establishing a sustainable supply line until it reaches self-sustainability. Given what we know about Mars at this point, we're easily centuries away from achieving self-sustainability on Mars even if we fully committed to this goal right away. This means it's not just a cool tech problem, it's a logistics problem and logistics are boring. There's a reason Musk has repeatedly said he merely wants to make it possible to colonize Mars, not that he wants to do it. He's also smart enough that he doesn't want to go there himself because he knows it would mean dying in a barren wasteland even in the best of cases. Musk doesn't want to do the digging, he wants to sell the shovels.
If we want to build up the supply lines to colonize Mars, we at the very least need not just cool space tech but also boring stuff like a permanent supply base on the moon. But the moon has become boring ever since the end of the Space Race and building a supply post on the moon is - again - a boring logistics problem first, not a cool space tech problem. And because it's boring, it's far easier to see the big problems with it (all of which not only hold true for Mars but also do so to a much greater scale): any supply lines you build to the moon require supply lines on Earth first.
If you want sustainable supply lines in space, you have to build sustainable supply lines on Earth. And to have sustainable supply lines on Earth for space, you need a sustainable source of surplus resources. And even if we ignore the social implications of generating such "surplus" when millions live in abject poverty, this can only work if we prevent climate change from spiraling further out of control because it's difficult to run a business when the economy has collapsed and even more difficult to get work done when all the workers keep dying (presumably dying consumers are a smaller issue if we only consider valuations not revenue).
Tesla initially produced four reasonably mass market EVs but the most Musk contributed to them personally concept-wise was the childish naming scheme to spell out "S3XY". This was followed by an electric semi that is largely forgotten after the initial hype and the Cybertruck which literally isn't considered road-safe in most countries and hardly qualifies as "mass market". Despite promising FSD for years, the best Tesla has demonstrated since were robotaxi concept cars that again don't seem to have been designed with mass market use in mind. As for FSD and robotics: again Tesla hasn't yet demonstrated any ability to come anywhere near Musk's promises. So contrary to the popular narrative Tesla is not "building an EV future" - not that it would be helping address climate change even if it were because that would require a focus on mass transport.
Which brings us to the next thing: the Boring company. Again Musk's narrative sold this as an important step in preparing for Mars because if water is underground on Mars we'll need a lot of tunnels but the company is best known for its many projects announced and subsequently cancelled or abandoned across the US - and the Las Vegas "Loop" which is a claustrophobic underground shuttle service with gamer lights and mostly exists because Elon Musk hyped the idea of a (high speed vacuum tunnel) "Hyperloop" to - and it's worth pointing out that he has literally admitted as much since - preempt plans to build a public highspeed rail system.
What else was part of the narrative? Oh, right: SolarCity. Again Musk bought a company and claimed it was part of a plan to colonize Mars because we don't have fossil fuels on Mars so certainly the future must be solar - and of course those Tesla Superchargers need to be charged somehow, too. The company was eventually folded into Tesla (as Tesla Energy) and has shifted from mass market solar panels to making most of its revenue from batteries and selling primarily to big customers.
SpaceX at least largely does what it says on the tin if you ignore that it mostly still exists because the US government all but abandoned direct investments in space travel and SpaceX managed to collect a number of lucrative government contracts by controlling a de-facto monopoly position. Starlink also mostly seems to exist to exert an uncomfortable amount of political power over the governments that have bought into it (as the Ukrainians had to find out the hard way).
Elon Musk has an almost obsessive hyperfixation on the letter X and the idea of colonizing Mars, yes - he's autistic. But that doesn't mean everything he does he does in service of that goal. It doesn't even mean he actively contributes towards that goal in a meaningful or well thought out manner. It doesn't explain why he decided to father an uncomfortable number of children with an even more uncomfortable selection of partners (especially when it comes to business partners and employees) or why he's extremely selective in which token child he decides to shower with praise and attention (if not his own then at least in public appearances). It doesn't explain why he actively sabotages more climate friendly public mass transit projects to favor unsustainable individualized transport deliberately designed in such a way it can not be accessible to most. It doesn't explain why he decided to make a great show of "leaving the left" and presenting himself as "anti-woke" just in time when a big hit piece on him was about to be published because of his inappropriate behavior toward women. Etc etc. None of that logically follows from the goal of making humans an interplanetary species except in the most trivial of ways (i.e. stranding a person on Mars would technically make humans an interplanetary species for as long as that person survives).
The hate (if you just want to lump all criticism or distate into that label) Elon Musk gets is not "because he wants to make humans an interplanetary species", he gets it for the things he does. And in many cases what he does is actively damaging to his stated goal.
You're still assuming having a "primary goal" means one's actions have to be aligned with achieving that goal.
I didn't say "making mankind an interplanetary species" isn't his primary goal, I said that it's not the primary thing he wants to do. What he seems to want to do is be rich, father an absurd number of children with different women and be cheered on and celebrated by his fans and sycophants. He literally bought Twitter on a whim because he liked the attention he got there. He's obsessed with appearing "cool" ever since people called him "real life Tony Stark" and he let it get to his head even though his popularity massively took a nosedive shortly after.
In answer to your question, it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much money musk has, or you have, or bezos has, or the government has. What matters is where that money is invested.
If musk was using his money to bang hookers on solid gold yachts, fine, complain about it. But he isn't. He doesn't even own a house.
Stop worrying about another man's dollar and start worrying about being a better and less covetous person.
Elon is clearly using his fortune to enact wide scale societal change. He's currently chilling in the president-elect's house and chatting with foreign leaders. How Elon spends his money shouldn't be my problem, but he's dead set on making it that.
he apparently has a personal axe to grind against transgenders thanks to his daughter. he's also placed himself in charge of some kind of widespread government defunding program with decreased regulations for his businesses at the top of the agenda.
well you're making a horrible argument of it. All you seem to be doing is saying "he's doing good things" and you dismiss any disagreement with "well what do you think he's doing?" with no further discussion.
Musk is a great argument that while the government is inefficient, they are still beholden to laws and people. Musk isn't. Tax him to high hell.
Yes because companies are totally unchecked and there's no regulation at all and because of this we have governance that brings us Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and bullshit wars and tampons in boys bathrooms and under lock and key at Walgreens. Good grief. This is not the kind of thing technical people or hackers want to read.
Is that a generalisation about the readership or to content here, or a bitter observation of lack of concern by the readership? There are multiple interpretations possible here.
The article mentions an Amazon policy to always call an ambulance when they find a medical issue. Seems to me the journalist should have told us more about this policy, as well as whether or not a similar policy exists at Tesco. This isn't enough for me to conclude this is just more biased opinion masquerading as journalism from socialists at The Guardian about one of the left's favorite capitalist whipping boys, but sounds like it would make sense to take a deeper look.
I get that it's a CYA on Amazon's part but it also puts other people at risk. There are limited ambulances and if they are always running to the Amazon warehouse for some triviality, someone seriously injured or having a stroke or heart attack somewhere else could have to wait longer.
I wonder if there is a technicality in the wording. It says "Ambulances have been called out" or "called to" it doesn't say they "attended" the warehouses.
999 operators will triage and prioritise ambulances based on the symptoms being exhibited.
Even worse, it happens at some nursing homes for anything worse than a bandaid.
"You have nurses! Even moreso, you're charging the patient/their family for '24/7 Nursing Care!'", meanwhile grandma has a slightly swollen foot and you're calling 911 to CYA or be lazy.
That is a valid criticism but it seems like a criticism of Britain's health care system. When people and organizations can have access to free ambulances and healthcare and the costs are paid for by others, the demand goes way up.
>The article mentions an Amazon policy to always call an ambulance when they find a medical issue.
True...there's a difference between having a policy and it being enforced, though. The article also contains a quote from a union organiser who seemed to cast doubt on that "We know from our members in Amazon warehouses that first-aiders are actively discouraged from ringing ambulances – instead told to take taxis"
I know I'm not coming from a neutral place here...I detest Amazon utterly, but I have been around too many large companies for too long to know that the "policy we quote" vs the "behaviour we enforce" are two entirely different things.
Obviously they shouldn't use community resources that frivolously. Calling an ambulance for a paper cut is ridiculous. This is why there are first aid teams. I was one of those in Ireland and the number of times we called an ambulance was probably 1 in 10 incidents or so.
Always calling an ambulance when there's a medical problem may simply be a terrible policy that puts a strain on public resources for the benefit of reduced liability. Tesco may take an approach which is more measured and less of a drain on wider society. There's something up, regardless.
“Socialists at The Guardian” - what does it even mean in this context? Even if ALL 1400 were Amazon being cautious and taking care of it’s employees (lol), how does it make sense to waste a precious resource like Ambulance for cases that can be fixed with a band aid?
left’s capitalist whipping boys - this is not without reason. How many times do you hear negative stories about Costco (as an example) mistreating their employees vs Amazon? Amazon is beaten up in the press because of their actions - just their union busting practices alone is worth the bad press they’re getting
It means that the Guardian is run by, written by, and read by people who are significantly more likely than other British people to be socialist or agree with socialist ideas.
One standard.