this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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When he was spending money on electric cars, solar, renewable energy storage and (relatively) low-cost space travel.
Yanno, before he got addicted to Twitter and became terminally online.
It honestly baffles me how many people have forgotten that Musk was heralded as basically being irl Batman because electric cars prior to Tesla were actual trash, there was little to no research being done on how to make space cheaper, and renewables only worked as long as the sun was shining and the wind was blowing (iirc the power wall was originally developed for renewable energy storage; Tesla also developed solar roof tiles so you could turn your roof into one big solar panel). He was using his money to actually help develop cleaner transportation, cleaner energy development and space travel instead of filling Olympic swimming pools with cash like most rich fucks.
Then he started posting on Twitter and everyone realized he was an idiot with too much money who got lucky with Tesla and SpaceX.
(Yes, I know he wasn't the founder of Tesla; however it was his money and idiocy-induced stubbornness that made the company successful)
Tesla "developed" those solar tiles as a fucking scam to sell investors on the Solarcity merger to bail his family out. It only ever came to fruition to keep him out of prison for outright fraud rather than just "fibbing". He bet the wellbeing of every employee and shareholder on that absolute dumpster fire of a company, literally scamming investors, just to save his ass, and it was nothing short of dumb fucking luck that kept it all burning to the ground, as he himself stated in a deposition.
Like everything else Musk does, those solar tiles are a way for wealthy people to greenwash their decadent lifestyle, while also allowing them to stay NIMBYs who don't want to ruin the look of their gaudy McMansions. Normal arrays cost fractions of what those tiles do, work better, and don't require replacing your entire roof for them.
Powerwalls were just a way to get rid of out of spec cells to people at 10x what their value is in an automotive pack. A home ESS is much gentler on them comparatively, so even out of spec cells work fine.
You want to talk about clean transportation? He came up with the literal pipe dream of the Hyperloop to keep cities from funding actual high-speed and light rail projects, so people would have to buy his shitboxes.
Literally everything he does is to keep his game as a greasy car salesman/government welfare queen going (see, SpaceX), and nothing more. Any positive benefits conferred from this are basically just a coincidence.
You mean... all those things that came from public institutions (ie, universities) and not parasites like Phony Stark?
Yes... by a media completely given over to licking the boots of the wealthy. Soooo... no leftists involved at all.
And how many of those people actually spent time implementing these improvements? Iirc, no one. Because the infrastructure wasn't there for electric cars and developing the infrastructure was going to be expensive, making electric cars basically useless for anything except short drives.
...which is where public transportation should be used.
But public transportation doesn't work in every situation, especially in a country where everything has been designed around cars, making public transportation retrofits obscenely expensive. Musk said, "I have a fuck ton of money, and that money is worthless if I'm not using it, so let's build the infrastructure to make electric cars worth it".
And so he did.
You know politics are a spectrum, right? There were a lot of people on the left who weren't associated with the MSM who thought he was the hottest thing since sliced bread. I knew a lot of people ranging from moderate liberal to hardcore left who liked him. The reason why the hardcore lefties liked him was because they saw him as a necessary evil.
The general opinion among the more hard leaning left was that the world is burning and something has to be done, if a rich person is taking steps in the right direction, then we'll back him until he stops being useful. We don't have the luxury to wait for the revolution or sit with our thumbs up our asses hoping oil and gas companies will just suddenly keel over and die. We need to do more to save our world and anything is better than nothing.
The only people who couldn't see that he was useful were idiots waiting for a perfect idol and were willing to sacrifice everyone for their personal, sky-high standards.
Edit: fixed a bit where I had inserted a sentence and forgot to actually connect it to something.
Probably not much... and probably because people at universities are smart enough to understand that electric cars doesn't fix any problems at all.
When you're in a hole it's best to stop digging. Continuing to rely on cars because fixing the mess that was caused for the benefit of capitalist parasites is "too expensive" is pure madness.
Lol! Such as whom? I think you have a very weird idea of what "left" actually is.
Really? Leftists just up and forgot how capitalism worked because... why, again?
Leftists understand that capitalism will never fix the problems capitalism has caused. Period. None of this is new - this has been general knowledge amongst leftists for more than a hundred years now.
No, people at universities typically understand that a better solution would be to use public transportation, however they also understand that doing so is a pipe dream and you have to fight against trillions of dollars to do so. Otherwise they wouldn't spend the time and effort to try and develop the technology in the first place. Seriously, what is the point of developing an electric car if you believe cars shouldn't exist? In that situation you're developing a technological dead-end.
In the meantime, our world is still burning and cars are shitting out more greenhouses gases.
Yes, because tearing up millions of square miles of suburban housing while displacing millions of people to compress it into a smaller space so that public transportation becomes feasible is definitely a realitic solution. New developments should be higher density and should have public transportation systems, however existing areas are kinda fucked from that standpoint.
The ones who were realistic did. You know people can believe something is bad, yet still engage in it or use it because the alternative isn't feasible, right? How many people still use plastic containers? How many people still drive cars? How many people still use social media? How many people still consume food with high-fructose corn syrup? How many people still call the cops in an emergency? How many people still use Amazon and/or Google? There are so many things that are bad for us, yet we still do them anyway, either because there's no alternative or because we lack the time, money and/or energy to cut them out of our lives.
Ideals are great, but they aren't grounded in reality and compromises have to be made. If you can't understand this, then you're dead weight for the people who are actually trying to make a difference.
I know you're trying to get a rise out of me, but c'mon, you can do better.
Well hallelujah, friends... the right-wingers have finally found a pretext that none of us can beat - they messed things up so badly that none of it can be fixed, and nobody should even try. I don't know why they just don't go public with that - they already have one believer right here.
You do understand that there are more uses for batteries than cars, right?
Plastic containers did't fall out of the sky - neither did cars. The people who benefit from their production doesn't live on Mount Olympus - we can strip them (and the political structures that enables them) of their power and fix these things. It's not some pipe dream or an ideal - it's literally the only way to guarantee humanity's continued survival on this planet.
The only thing you seem to have "grounded in reality" is that the destruction of literally everything should be "compromised" with. It seems the only thing you are willing to do is compromise - but I guess that's where the money is, huh?