Look, I’m not the biggest Elon fan but this is absolutely fucking moronic.

This doofish “analysis” lumps together three very different things. Tesla’s carbon credits aren’t tax dollars and have nothing to do with taxes. They’re paid by other automakers, including in China and the EU, that miss emissions targets. Most of the rest is SpaceX contracts, which pay for actual launches, crew flights and satellite service, very often cheaper than the alternatives. That’s no more “milking” than Boeing or Lockheed getting paid for what they build (also highly subsidized by these standards!). By any count, the total is dwarfed by the auto bailout, and fossil fuels get roughly that much in federal support every damn year. And his fortune is mostly stock in his companies, not government checks. The only fair critique is that public money was crucial to SpaceX and Tesla surviving early on, which is hypocritical when contrasted with Musk’s attacks on government spending.

And you know what, I am absolutely fine with public money going towards advancing the interests of the nation and improving tech; that makes everyone’s life better. We should have industrial policy and it should do things like this (and far, far more). Subsidies aren’t inherently bad¹. They are how we get more of what we want and need.

I do agree that no one should be allowed to be as rich as Elon, but that’s not what this is talking about.

I just do not understand why otherwise-smart people wish to beclown themselves this way. It is undignified.

1. Hell, I am old enough to remember when liberals were fully behind subsidies all over the place when it advanced their political agenda.

Oh, don’t do that to Gen Z. You know they don’t understand jokes. Or satire. Or attraction, sex, being social or…wait, what do they understand? Oh yeah, how to be prudes. That they have covered (heh).

The most annoying part of most of the left is how they expect you to apologize to them and take the blame for them being clueless prudish clownish dumbasses.

And I’m simply not gonna do that.

That’s right. Women do not understand men very well at all. Because they do not have to. Men very much do have to understand women, however, if they ever want to get a date, etc.

Thus, women often conclude (with no evidence) that men do things that women mostly actually do, but that in fact men rarely do. It’s 99% projection. “Locker room” talk? Almost all women. Bedpost notching (metaphorically speaking)? Mostly (but not exclusively) women. Women are even somewhat more likely to share intimate photos of their partners than men are. Which is pure evil if non-consensual, I might add.

Women know nearly nothing about men, generally speaking, and have nearly no empathy for men. It’s quite amusing when you realize that, and how much of what they “know for certain” about men is merely weird projection.

Users and AI.

I just had a user asking me to allow claude to have complete access to his Microsoft mailbox. I told him no since sensitive mails are often sent to the entire company including discussions concerning projects etc.

He went silent and then said … "but how do you use your mail then ?"

I had to explain to him that we old people used mail for decades without the use of an AI telling us what someone mailed.

He was genuinely baffled how you can just open Outlook and read a mail without asking Claude what someone had sent.

I see more and more of this type of thing.

Users have never understood much or been capable of achieving anything left unsupervised, but AI has certainly made it worse. And it’s only downhill from here in that respect.

One could also accurately say this:

“If you had enough resources, you could run a human brain on a wooden system of gears and diesel power. It would be massive, but watching the cells and neurotransmitters move, it would be evident that the outputs are not the result of a mind. Part of the illusion of human thought is the tiny scale of neurons.”

What is going on here? Do the doofs not realize how clownish this all sounds?

By the way, this is nearly word for word Leibniz’s mill argument from the Monadology. Except this person of course would not know that. There, ol’ Leibniz imagined a thinking machine enlarged to the size of a mill. However, the same thought experiment works for your own brain. If you enlarged that to the size a mill (or a city), all you’d see is ion channels pumping and some flashes of electricity. There would be no thought or reasoning visible anywhere; just organic mechanism.

Try as you might, you still would not find that damn pesky ghost. And that’s because it’s nowhere to be found.