BF2S Forums EE Chats 2142

Weekly reminder that Dune is a sci-fi. I should bring this up every Sunday.

COVID has really thrown a wrench into public transportation advocacy. It turns out we don't actually need to spend billions of dollars moving people from the suburbs to offices everyday. We could even unload the corporate cost of providing office space onto the workers by making them pay for WFH accomodations.

when have i ever spoken about someone's intelligence, relevant to my own? i'm talking about musk's public relations branding and his totally ridiculous reverence amongst a very specific type of dweeby male on the internet.

musk has talked a very fine game and is mostly a bullshit merchant. talking about securing plans to build hyperloops between major US cities, etc, before  even the most basic proof of concept. talking about boring tunnels under los angeles or building fancy future-tube highways beneath vegas. all they've amounted to is daft, borderline dangerous baubles for tesla fanboys to cheer at. in almost every case a high-speed train or, you know, a fucking bus would have been better. genius! revolutionising travel! what a great use of city funding.



amazing. he proposed replacing a public monorail system with ... two one-way, single-vehicle tunnels ... which took 18 months to construct and can accommodate about 6 tesla taxis at once. genius!



remember when he announced the amazing tesla truck which was going to 'revolutionize' haulage? but then omitted to mention in his presentation any salient fact or figure which a logistics/haulage company actually needs? like, you know, it's range and efficiencies? instead he kept bragging about its 0-60mph speed or something. because that's what haulage companies really want. trucks you can race at red lights. this is your 'engineering genius'?

Last edited by uziq (2021-09-20 06:38:10)

elon musk DIDNT found tesla.

amazing how a perfunctory bit of research can confound his fanboys. the company already had a car in development ffs.

i’ve already granted that he’s a great frontman. but silicon valley loves throwing money at blaggers. not a ‘successful engineer’. he didn’t engineer shit at tesla.

who would have considered a commercial space company? i don’t know … richard branson? the idea was kicking around in the private sector since the 1990s. the fact NASA was chronically underfunded hardly means these billionaire ‘astronauts’ are great pioneers.

Last edited by uziq (2021-09-21 21:40:28)

yes the complete disconnect is why he chose to symbolically fire his first tesla roadster into space.

and he personally engineered their later vehicles.

righty ho. fanboys gonna fanboy

he took over the board of tesla. it’s rampantly overvalued.

he didn’t do anything for paypal tbh. other VCs with proper business school chops and connections built it up.

spacex is making strides, sure. but it’s timing as much as anything. state funding for space travel is low. the private sector is going to take advantage of new leaps in materials and rocket tech. i hardly credit him as some space genius.

many of his other business ideas are squibs on a notebook. hyper loop, boring company, etc. completely mad thinking that don’t even hold up to simple scientific scrutiny. ‘if it seems too good to be true’ / ‘if it hasn’t been done already …’. but choo choo goes the hype train.

Last edited by uziq (2021-09-22 02:47:41)

again with the asinine, childish ‘counter-arguments’.

‘oh yeah no one can be smarter than YOU’.
‘if he’s so bad, where’s your space exploration company?’
‘LOL i’m sure he’s really bothered by your comments’.

sigh. i just said he’s totally over-rated and has a cult of personality around him. i don’t need to be a more successful businessman or a noteworthy fellow CEO to shoot down his ridiculous levels of praise on the internet. (though hasn't warren buffet expressed extreme skepticism about tesla's market value?)

for a levelheaded scientific type you seem weirdly allergic to ordinary scrutiny and skepticism. any cursory look at the history of elon’s ‘businesses successes’ shows a guy piggy-backing upon, and inserting himself into, success stories. that’s a skill in-itself, to be sure, though networking, self-congratulatory and prophetic insider clubs, and bluster curiously seem like the skills you decry in ‘arts hipsters and humanities graduates’.

he wrote hapless code for his first business which had to be scrapped by the first professional full time coder to come in. he was ‘chief technology officer’ at the time. in the same way that someone with a small office and a few thousand dollars to trade can be a ‘vice chairman’ or ‘co-VP of a venture capitalist firm’ or whatever.  silicon valley, it goes without saying, is the epicentre of the ‘fake it until you make it’ philosophy … and some horses really do go all the way, until the inevitable crash or bottom falling out, at which point they’re already ‘celebrities’ with the ability to leverage immense capital anyway (cf. uber, wework, tesla).

silicon valley is full of this self-mythologising crap. what’s amazing is that tesla itself has a LONG history of workplace grievance, poor work culture, engineers moaning about the sky-high and deluded talk that elon was selling to investors (possibly committing fraud in the process). elon is a lot like elizabeth holmes, of theranos, who promised the world on a platter, had the forbes magazine covers to show for it, and meanwhile kept rooms of engineers in a cold sweat under NDAs.

if it was your CEO or manager you’d be queefing about it in the work complaints thread. but instead elon is a genius polymath … lol ok. do some reading there buddy.

Last edited by uziq (2021-09-22 03:20:51)

you namedrop him as an example of a 'successful engineer who changes the world'.

hasn't engineered anything noteworthy.
didn't found 2 of his big 3 companies.
the company which has catapulted him to 'tony stark' fame is overvalued by about 75%.

just some small corrections. glad to hear you don't have an elon musk tattoo.

NASA's budget is a rounding error of the national purse, and, no, spaceX was still very much dependent on the research and work done across NASA's many national labs.

NASA's funding last year was $22 billion.

spaceX employs 10,000 people and is worth $75 billion. not to mention the number of employees and expertise they just took from NASA. it's not exactly a 'competitor' or 'besting' scenario. like all 'libertarian genius tech billionaires', it's proximity to state funding/grants, the military, lucrative monopolies, etc, which ensure their success. you make it sound like he built a company from scratch – and was a 'successful engineer', natch – when that's hardly the picture.

spaceX hasn't made him a global billionaire figure anyway. it's tesla that built the cult-of-personality, and it's tesla that's dramatically overvalued. isn't tesla currently valued as the MOST VALUABLE automobile maker on the planet? bigger than GM? toyota? the peugeut conglomerate? lmao. if the market value of tesla were to be corrected, elon would lose a vast amount of his estimated fortune.

as for genius billionaire, hasn't his drug-addled twitter trolling led to him being almost twice removed from the board/CEO position? doesn't he mostly spend his time nowadays smoking weed with joe rogan and pumping-and-dumping meme crytocurrencies? yeah, what a mastermind. and i'm not even going to get onto his union busting, or his covid denialism, or his rampant self-promotion, inserting himself into rescue scenarios and generally making an ass of himself. genius!

Last edited by uziq (2021-09-22 07:53:49)

it's cringe when teenagers do the 'elon' thing on reddit but dilbert is like a 50-something guy who is actually a trained engineer.

genuinely bizarre how much some people need to believe in these demi-god tony stark engineering figures. too much MCU.

I think throughout the last few years we've noticed that market value and stock price isn't a good indicator of a company's actual 'worth'. In many cases it just means the stock is popular and changes hands often, which can be wholly based on public goodwill to an investment. Like tesla, or uber. Or crypto.

I haven't cared about musk enough to read up much but I'm a little sceptical of the idea that his involvement in tesla or paypal amounted to little more than throwing money in and pitching sales. If I recall he did have a fairly big hand in the early success.

Even if Musk perfected Solar Panels and electric cars, it is still a long way away from "propelling humanity forward". We already have cars and energy generation. It's not like inventing the wheel or the internet.