I think the idea of some technology marvel not happening yet being subjective of ridicule is a bit weird. I celebrate the recent developments in fusion despite that fusion was 2 decades away for the last 5 decades. Self-driving car technology is probably as hard to be achieved.
Elon Musk | Doer of things on X and sad little man
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
But public transport kinda sucks. So it won’t be the future of anything. And in non dense cities (most of the US), it sucks even more.
1 Year out https://www.popsci.com/article/cars/tesla-ceo-wants-mostly-self-driving-cars-next-year/ (2014)
2 Years out https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview/ (2015)
It's achieved https://www.wired.com/2016/10/elon-musk-says-every-new-tesla-can-drive/ (2016)
I'm sure I could go on but can't bother doing it for every year. It's 2023 now.
I agree that it's always in the future like fusion but I'd also say anyone who confidently predicted fusion (economical use) would happen within 2 years in 2015 has a bit of egg on his face now.
The non density of American cities is a disaster in city planning, an environmental disaster, a monetary disaster and a choice of policy that needs to be corrected. Public transportation is part of a solution for the underlying issue. And not, as you suggest, a reason against it.
Current public transport sucks. But it could be better. I actually see a future of driverless trams more than personal cars.
Public transport doesn't suck, though. It sucks in rural areas (where few people live) and in places where it's a political decision for it to suck (almost all of the US).
Most of the western US cities were planned during an era where environmental issues were not known and done in a way to take advantage of the one resource they believed they had in abundance: space. Sadly, the automobile industry also dismantled the public transportation infrastructure in places like Los Angeles and after a half-century or more building this way it's not really something that can just be "corrected." Once a city has grown the way a Los Angeles or Dallas or even a smaller city like Reno has grown, it's pretty much impossible to now say "oops" let's make these cities more like Copenhagen or Berlin. Los Angeles has been trying for two decades now to retroactively reinstall a public transportation system and it's not very efficient (either monetarily or environmentally) but its slowly making things a little better.
California has been doing a decent job (minus the disaster of Jerry Brown's fossil fuel-burning railway boondoggle to Bakersfield and Fresno) of updating the state infrastructure and taking contemporary environmental concerns into account but it's not an easy process and spending billions on transportation comes with tradeoffs such as less money to manage the housing crisis and thus, the homeless.
One thing that helps, a positive lesson from the pandemic, is increasing remote work which removes the need for daily commutes. More businesses have switched to that model and should be encouraged to do that in the future. I work remotely myself but if I had to go into my company's office and take public transportation it would literally take 2.5 hours each way every day (which is basically a non-starter). Personally, I think every job that could be done remotely should, at least, have a hybrid option as the more remote workers we have the easier it is to reduce carbon footprint and make transportation (public or private) much more effective. Remote work and energy efficiency of buildings + personal and commercial solar has been a great success in California and that's the best place to start here IMO.
So, so far off topic 
Isn't there a thread for this stuff instead?
Isn't there a thread for this stuff instead?
Cities cannot be rebuilt though. So that is a non starter.
Also, it sucks. I use it every day for monetary and environmental reasons, but still it sucks. I can only imagine how it would be in sparse cities of US.
They can. But it takes time, money, determination and politicians willing to do what should have been done decades ago.
We'll have flying cars before autonomous ones.
We'll only have flying cars if we've perfected autonomous ones. Or we're going to have a lot of drunk drivers crashing into buildings.
How? It's easy to just say vague things like "time, money, and politicians" but how would you actually go about rebuilding Los Angeles into some futuristic city like you envision? It would be far easier and more efficient and better for the environment to simply build new cities with all the knowledge we have now than trying to tear down and reconstruct current ones.
The same principles low density cities were build. By doing whatever is possible to make city centers more attractive. Stop any subsidies for private car ownership. Build functioning public transportation networks in city centers. Make driving there less attractive, too expensive and simply unnecessary. Locate businesses back in city centers instead of building them in the middle of nowhere, in giant ugly malls. It's a long process. It's an expensive process. But so was the construction of hellish asphalt deserts such as the city of Houston, which is no more than a miscarriage of city developing. And obviously you start with the most doable stuff and utilize the resources already at your disposal. Better public transportation? You already have a shitload of streets. Buy busses, make them cheap, clean and reliable and go from there. And houses can be torn down. So can malls. Renaturation is possible and has been done before.
American cities are a suburban nightmare. And they are so by choice. And these choices were also incredibly expensive, difficult, took decades of (idiotic) planning and were no less of a monstrous task to enact, than reversing this wrong course could be.
I absolutely know that I'm demanding an awful lot and that it is in no way realistic that we will see it happen. But I'm also convinced that it is necessary, doable and the right thing to do. And personally that's more than enough reason to do it, for me.
Oh, there's also nothing futuristic about it. We already have cities like this and there are more and more going this way.
To recap: spend a shitload of money for some solution which is worse than the current one, and that likely most of people will just not accept. HTG for president!
Is this still the Elon Musk thread?
WTF happened to this thread?
Might as well start talking about what I had for lunch today. Chicken White bean chili with a little shredded cheddar on top and avocado slices. It was excellent.
Might as well start talking about what I had for lunch today. Chicken White bean chili with a little shredded cheddar on top and avocado slices. It was excellent.
Back to Musk's Twitter, my app just kindly recommended a tweet from Musk despite having him blocked.
This seems like a very undesirable idea to me, especially for a city like Los Angeles where you also have to take into account earthquakes and the water issue.
What I started to hear from people that worked in the green energy sector when I worked there some years ago was actually the exact opposite. Dispersing population more away from city centers and building more sustainable communities from the ground up that include far more efficient water and waste recycling, more energy efficient buildings and implementing solar (and other energy sources from geothermal to wind, etc) then connecting this more dispersed communities using non-fossil fuel burning transportation like mag-lev trains.
To me, that is really the solution moving forward. It's not to force people back into commuting into city centers and tearing down hundreds of thousands houses to build apartments and condos (regardless if that commute is on non-fossil burning public transport), its to reject completely this outdated idea of going into the office and forcing high density living entirely. Remote work solves some of these issues organically IMO. The pandemic showed that people don't have to commute to an office to get work done. I've had recruiters contact me in the last year and my first question is "is this position 100% remote?" and if the answer is no I end the talk right there. Feck living in a high-density city just so I can commute to an office. I, and many people I know, have zero desire to ever go back to 20th-century office culture. Feck that. Working remotely allows people to not have to cram into high-density cities and allows for solutions like the new communities I know some green sector people have been envisioning.
Anyway, I guess people just want to whine about Musk's latest tweet so we can continue this in another thread at some point.
Woke mind virus.
Judge all you want, it was fantastic.
I'm sure it was, it does sound good.
My feed is now awash with right wing blowhards, GBeebies and Tory MPs (although they’re not mutually exclusive) - is this Musk creating that so-called virtual town hall?
Define kinda sucks.
Because this was posited by finance VC types as their little minds struggled to come up with ways to make money so pushed this dumb ass idea onto the world.
For you: Oh here's endless bollocks from the right wing and racist feckers.
Yeah mine has 100% got worse now for all this. I used to flick between the two and never had an issue, now the "for you" tab is endless garbage from these scumbags.
Yeah mine has 100% got worse now for all this. I used to flick between the two and never had an issue, now the "for you" tab is endless garbage from these scumbags.
Honestly, you can get away with doing anything in America, as long as it's in the name of 'freedom'. I love the way someone's always paying the price for 'freedom' also.
It’s not about the US in this case, it’s about Musk fiddling with algorithms within the company he now owns.
I know, but the freedom line gets me every time. Musk can't help himself, he's trying to force this vision of a thing that nobody wants. This global town square sounds like a nightmare where people just scream at each other the people with the biggest pockets have the biggest voice. I hope it burns to the ground, social media has had it's day anyway.
Had to have, my timeline is now 90% nonsense.
If the intention is letting people see more of the other side, ie outside their comfort zone, I wonder if right wing based accounts are also getting more liberal ads and tweet recommendations.
Musk is a far right nutter and basically a threat to peace and stability, he wants controversy and chaos. So I'll let you work out the answer to your question.
That's definitely not happening.
He's not a far right nutter, no more than any other grifter like Trump is.
He's definitely right-wing. For Trump the grift is obvious, he's made an absolute shitload of money from donations and fund-raising. But Musk's culture war moves have actively hurt him. It's cost him... I mean, what? Billions at least. Tens of billions? Is it a hundred yet?
He's not a "far right nutter".
I mean considering his background and all that, he probably should be, but there's some semblance of humanity in him. I'd argue that he really did love the Tony Stark comparisons, he truly loved the stoner stuff, he is always and will always be looking for attention. Whilst I'd definitely say he has the same kind of mental thoughts as right wingers, I'm certain he is just latching on to a fanbase no matter their political views.
It's a slippery slope, but he's not one of the people he's grifting. Again, no more than Trump is.
Musk gives the impression of being so damaged and emotionally retarded that I honestly think his politics will always skew towards whoever gives him the love/attention he craves. As soon as the always online tech bros/incels/gamergate/nerds/whatever started hailing him as the new messiah his politics inevitably drifted to the libertarian right, as that went down better with his base.
Although it obviously helps that these politics are the most likely to allow the mega rich hold onto their billions.
Kelvin Mackenzie
Darren Grimes
Sophie Cocoran
Dan Wootton
Laurence Fox
Julia Hartley Brewer
Allison Pearson
Dan Hodges
Piers Morgan
Elon Musk
I do not follow any of these people. I do not like any of their content or any content that is in the vein of what they post yet my timeline is awash with all of them. I also make a point of never interacting with these posts.
To be honest it’s probably all stuff @esmufc07 os retweeting.