ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
Lunacy is labeling anything you don’t like as the above.
You forgot to add “Russian” and or “Fascist” btw.
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Politics - Quarantine Thread
- Thread starter steve841
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You forgot to add “Russian” and or “Fascist” btw.
That's not nice. We should be sympathetic to people suffering from gender pronoun dysphoria.The irony of this is unbelievable considering recent actions. Incredible hypocrisy
NigelM
Recovering Member
Respect your point of view. Apologies if I'm stereotyping but it's unusual that a professional woman like you espouses so vehemently.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
If you look at their bio you’ll see that they identify as a male.
Either way, what difference does that make? Are women not allowed to express their views?
Man, responding on my phone is terrible for writing. This site is weird they do not allow one to edit stuff to fix typing mistakes.
To me it makes more sense that at its root gender (like sex drive and sexual attraction) is biological. It's necessary for survival of the species that people have to want to reproduce, and to reproduce they need attract a mate, and to attract a mate they have to appeal to their desired mates.
So I don't like that "gender is a societal construct" phrase because it isn't all societal, and I think the terminology is reversed. The thing that we call gender identity, should really be called the gender, and the varying and shifting behaviors gender norms. Then, sure, "gender norms are a societal construct".
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
Until certain members dredge in the usual WW2 axis power monikers in reference to EM or anyone who isn’t all in on calling him that.
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
True story: When I won the Nobel Prize in 2008, Princeton quickly set up a special event on campus and reserved a parking space for me in front of Robertson Hall. But when I drove up in my 2004 Jetta, the security people frantically tried to wave me away. They clearly didn’t find it plausible that a laureate would be driving such a modest car.
I’m still driving that car today.
The point is that I’m not one of those people who cares much about what he drives. (No doubt I act out my egotism in other ways.) But many people do, in fact, use their cars to symbolize their status — indeed, their identity.
There’s no point being censorious. Conspicuous consumption is a very human thing, going back as far as civilization itself. Over time, however, the form has changed. These days it’s relatively hard to tell how rich people are by the clothes they wear, which gives other status markers like cars a more important role. Also, in modern times people use consumer goods to display their values as well as their wealth. A fancy pickup truck sends one kind of message; a Tesla sends another.
And yes, speaking of Tesla, today’s newsletter is partly about Elon Musk.
As I wrote in my last newsletter, the main reason to believe that Tesla’s huge market value doesn’t make sense has little to do with Musk’s antics at Twitter. The problem instead is that Tesla’s dominance of the electric vehicle market is already fading as we speak, so the company is unlikely to generate the kind of extraordinary long-term profits that would justify its stock price.
That said, Musk has indeed been acting very oddly — and in ways that seem almost perfectly calculated to drive away his best customers.
After all, what does it mean to buy a Tesla? It’s a luxury car, but there are other luxury cars. What’s special about a Tesla is that it’s an electric, zero-emission luxury car — one that purports to be a glitzy ride to a sustainable future.
Also, until just the other day, Musk himself was widely seen as a cool guy. And cool in a futuristic sense: His company sends rockets into outer space; he was living with a popular musician who released an album inspired by the science-fiction novel “Dune” (a book that, by the way, was recently made into a terrific movie).
So what message was someone sending by driving a Tesla? Basically — I don’t think I’m being unfair — it was: “I’m rich but I’m woke.” Mock that stance all you like, but it really did increase Tesla sales. And it means that many Tesla buyers are probably also Democrats.
I’m not just guessing here. The other day a friend of mine who writes under the nom de internet Invictus used New York State data to compare county-level political leanings with Tesla registrations. Sure enough, in 2020, counties that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump — they do exist, even in New York — purchased far fewer Teslas per capita than those that voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden.
Charles Gaba, known, among other things, for his documentation of the correlation between political leanings and vaccination status, has replicated these results for several states. Here, for example, is what it looks like in California:
Teslas are a Democratic thing.Credit...Charles Gaba
To delve a bit deeper, here’s a comparison — using data from Invictus and the American Community Survey — between Steuben County, a very Trumpy area southeast of Buffalo, and Westchester County, a wealthy and very Democratic New York suburb that includes Scarsdale:
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Rich, woke Tesla drivers, New York edition.Credit...Invictus, American Community Survey
So, yes, there are a lot of Teslas in Westchester, hardly any in Steuben. To some extent this may reflect the fact that people in Westchester have more income. But despite what you sometimes hear about the parties reversing class roles lately, Americans with incomes over $100,000 still vote Republican by a fairly large margin. What has reversed is the educational divide: College graduates have become a Democratic bloc, which supports the view that what we might call the Tesla divide is also linked to the culture war. And Westchester has far more college graduates than Steuben does.
Tesla, then, is a brand whose customer base largely consists of wealthy cultural liberals who were attracted in part by Elon Musk’s perceived with-it persona. Given all that, Musk’s public embrace of MAGA conspiracy theories is an almost inconceivably bad marketing move, practically designed to alienate his main buyers. What’s going on?
To a large extent Musk may simply be revealing who he always was — basically, a typical technology oligarch. In general, authoritarian instincts and contempt for the little people are a lot more prevalent among the Silicon Valley elite than people realized when information technology still felt cool.
Even among his class, however, Musk stands out for his lack of impulse control. This was obvious, if you paid attention, long before he bought Twitter. More than four years have passed since he called a cave rescuer who rejected Musk’s offer of a mini-submarine a “pedo guy.”
Furthermore, Musk’s behavior is becoming even more bizarre. (A favorite line of mine is that people get worse as they grow older because they become more like themselves.) Since when do captains of industry respond to random critics by mocking their imagined anatomies?
Now, as I wrote in my last newsletter, Tesla was probably headed for a fall eventually, even if Musk had been who his fans imagined him to be; the economics of the electric vehicle business just aren’t conducive to long-term market domination. But Musk might have been able to postpone the day of reckoning, at least for a while, if he had managed to hide who he was from his best customers a little longer.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
Thanks. I needed a good laugh.
He’s ours (Libertarians) now, and you can’t have him back.
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Just wondering since I got the car for &52.9k are we all still qualifying for the $7500 from the Brandon administration? It would be nice, but majority of us won’t qualify. Nir the price cut I can live with. I just ordered for the wife and she can’t wait to get her car, yet she refuses to drive my 22MYP.
I'm sure there are millions that follow him, just as they did with Trump, to see what outlandish/crazy/pathetic thing they will say or do next.
When I owned a Tesla I followed him for Tesla information, and I imagine quite a few people do.
When I got rid of the Tesla (bored of passenger car EVs) I didn't stop following him, but certainly stopped checking his tweets and retweets like I did before.
I mostly used twitter to follow AI people. To a large extent they seem to complain about Musk and twitter, but they remain.
Twitter is now a place where people seem to enjoy to hate, but refuse to leave. Haha.
It's interesting how I hate each social media company differently
FB -> Hate the archaic technology and how groups are managed.
Instagram -> Hate the policies and uneven policing and not being able to set the feed to followers only
Twitter -> Any time I get caught up in a thread with multiple people where I have no idea who is talking to who
I personally would like a social media account that gave me control over my own AI bot which could be tuned to seek out things I like, and would remove duplicates of the same crap. It would go as far as being able to have conversations with someone elses bot which would then determine if the human behind the bot would have any interest.
For $44 billion Elon could have created something really compelling, but didn't go that route.
italian bread
Member
80+ million Americans voted for Biden in the last presidential election. Biden must be the most popular president ever! And it proves that most Americans agree with his current policies and will definitely support his future policies no matter what they are! /S
Are you truly unaware that thousands of people (including some very high prominent accounts) were kicked off Twitter and Social Media for the "violence" of misgendering people?
Are you truly unaware that thousands more were kicked off Twitter for having questions about Government COVID policies?
Then of course we have the whole "election denial" bans that only seem to go in one direction.
Seriously, what made Elon turn MAGA? Like, it's not just a conservative mentality anymore...he's always defensive on Twitter like he's supported Trump since 2016 or something....logically, what he posts on Twitter and why and how he runs Tesla cancel each other out....
He probably viewed a couple of videos or tweets and the algorithms did the rest.
TSLY
Member
Russian state TV claims Elon Musk is a "war criminal" for providing Starlink to Ukraine. Meanwhile, far left claims Musk is "pro-Russia" for worrying about nuclear war and suggesting Ukraine negotiating for peace.
It's just like Musk said, you're a true moderate/centralist when you're hated by both sides.
Gauss Guzzler
Safety Score = 42
Well, Putin calls anyone who doesn't support his invasion "a war criminal."
And Elon never suggested that Ukraine should negotiate for peace. He suggested that they should fully surrender.
It boggles my mind how people see this as "Aw, poor Elon is only hated because he's just so gosh darn centered and reasonable."
No.
Elon needs Xi's approval and by helping to defeat Ukraine he is obviously helping to defeat Taiwan.
Putin is Putin. This has nothing to do with Elon or reality or anything else. The only thing that ever comes out of Putin's mouth is propaganda.
And Elon never suggested that Ukraine should negotiate for peace. He suggested that they should fully surrender.
It boggles my mind how people see this as "Aw, poor Elon is only hated because he's just so gosh darn centered and reasonable."
No.
Elon needs Xi's approval and by helping to defeat Ukraine he is obviously helping to defeat Taiwan.
Putin is Putin. This has nothing to do with Elon or reality or anything else. The only thing that ever comes out of Putin's mouth is propaganda.
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