I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
This isn't preparing in the slightest. This is impulse-response. Taking a sledgehammer to our institutions and seeing what happens. A cruel child picking apart the legs of a spider just to see how many it can before it dies.
Adding performance guidelines has been done before. It was done in a systematic way that tried very carefully to avoid disruption to functions[1]. DOGE is forcing its way into offices and physically compromising internal data systems in order to feed data into an experiment.
i don't have any experience in high level CEO stuff, but i heard when companies are purchased (takeover's etc.) they say consider what you need to cut; then cut double what you initially think.
i think you should keep in mind that both parties have very smart people in them that care about the country and are trying to do the right thing.
it's a shame the best gov employees are probably non-partisan but you'll never see them in those jobs.
>i think you should keep in mind that both parties have very smart people in them that care about the country and are trying to do the right thing.
I think this is an absurd claim that is not supported by the facts. DOGE staff are young Elon sycophants[1] that have openly and explicitly supported eugenic policies[2]. There is no reason to believe that they are trying to do the right thing.
Yes this has been planned for a while. But accelerating the existing schedule by 4 or 5 years would almost certainly result in a large increase to the existing $843 million dollar contract that Space X has. Elon definitely has a conflict of interest here.
Sure, and speeding up the ISS deorbit timeline would almost certainly mean a lot more money for SpaceX, at a time when SpaceX's competitors are still very far behind in terms of capability. Musk wants an earlier ISS deorbit because it lines his pockets sooner, and more reliably.
Not only does Musk have a lot of power to get favors granted to him now, but I'm sure he also realizes that there could be significant backlash against him and his companies during a future administration, if his and Trump's actions turn out to be as broadly, bipartisan-ly unpopular as I'm hoping. So not only will he want to extract as much as he can from the government now, he'll want to consolidate and increase his lead over his competitors so a future administration may have no choice but to continue using SpaceX for the bulk of its needs.
The ISS is essentially worthless and the contract to deorbit has already been given to SpaceX (during the Biden administration no less.) There is no useful (much less economically sensible) research being done on the ISS. If you consult NASA FAQs, the way they like to justify it to the public is the ISS is a center for research that will help humanity live in space. That's bullshit. We figured out decades ago that human bodies start breaking down after more than a few months in microgravity and there's really fuck-all that can be done about that. Pursuing spin habs is one possible avenue for the future, but the ISS isn't one. It's dead end technology.
And on the topic of dead end technology, let's face the fact that the ISS is just Mir 2 with US participation. The DOS-8 module it's built around is the module Mir 2 was to be built around, Mir (1) being DOS-7, and the previous DOSes were the Salyut stations. Direct hardware lineage. The only reason these things exist in the first place is because the Soviet Union though space stations would be good for earth observation, a role they are wholly obsolete in now, but once the Soviet Union started building something they liked to keep building it long after it made sense (see also, the Vostok capsule, which they are still using as a satellite bus to this day.). And the only reason the US is involved in this is literally welfare to the Russian aerospace industry to prevent their engineers from having to seek employment in Iran/etc. In this role too, it is obviously obsolete.
Now a word about Mars, because I can already sense somebody about to accuse me of being a senseless musk fanboy. Mars colonization makes no sense and musk is lying about pursuing it. For a Mars colony to actually become a "backup for humanity" of whatever drivel he claims, it would need to bootstrap itself into self sufficiency, which at the very least would require a viable economy for trading with Earth. No such economic plan for a Mars colony exists. Furthermore, SpaceX isn't even investing in the creation of the requisite colony hardware, the habitats and Martian industrial infrastructure which would be required to make it work. What they're actually doing is far more mundane; building rockets for launching satellite into Earth orbit. The Mars talk is just a recruitment tactic to pull in young idealistic engineers and get them to work long hours for cheap.
This tired trope fails to capture the accelerationism at play. Elon is firing the most ambitious people in government. 8 years in one position, 1 year promoted fired over the person 9 years in one position.
This is not the nature of union employment, it is a structural weakness in the way employment has been negotiated. Musk is exploiting that weakness.
>We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years
We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry.
Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather than funding higher education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now that everyone could, those in power chose to systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and replace it with a degree-for-debt model.
State universities that used to provide low/free tuition to white men, now offer their services to all, for an ever-increasing price.
This has created a society where smart people get on the edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.
>ACTUAL crisis of HUMAN OVERPOPULATION which is at the root of every problem e.g. climate change
False. The rich disproportionately pollute. Climate change isn't a population problem, it is a resource allocation problem. If the poorest 50% of all people disappeared tomorrow, emissions would only decline by 10%[1].
Incredibly important for the comfort and wellbeing of space travelers. Imagine being in an enclosed box compacted as efficiently as possible next to thrusters and life support equipment. The noise must be insane. At the same time, current noise suppression materials have to be heavy. Every gram saved is worth its weight in gold.
> a tax on unhealthy food to help fund Medicare and Medicaid.
Fully 13% of the population lives in an area with restricted access to grocery stores[1]. Couple that with car-centric anti-pedestrian development[2] and you have a definitively societal problem. Addressing that with taxes on the individual will not address these causes, only shift the burden further onto the poor.
>That said, I'd still make the same point that people who value art and the artist will buy from and support the artist.
The chances anyone will come across the artist when their marketplace is flooded with increasingly plausible simulacra become more and more slim as time goes on.
AI is choking off any hope for artists supported by patronage, simply by virtue of discoverability being lost and trust being eroded.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.