• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • He sounds similar to those insufferable effective altruists. Most of these people have a genuine skill in something narrow, and the willingness to walk all over everyone in pursuit of the ‘highest score’ achievement on their ‘net worth’.

    Yet they’ve convinced themselves that only they can save the world, so they have to make as much money as possible by any means necessary in order to fund misguided charities. They’ll burn down the planet and anyone necessary to make money so they can save it.

    Sir Chris is still in control of his charity, so really all that money he gave them is still in pursuit of his own goals, the charity is only spending money it makes through its investments. So whilst it sounds so generous to donate billions to charity and I’m sure it brought him great publicity, it’s little more than a tax-efficient way to attempt to bring about societal changes that society didn’t ask for.

    I’m sure it was also nice that whilst he ‘donated’ billions to the charity, when it came to his divorce settlement, that was taken out of his ‘personal fortune’ which amounted to less than a billion.

    So don’t give him that much credit.



  • Probably to continue getting ‘Gulf Region’-rich off the back of the oil it found in an area that is internationally recognised as their territory.

    Even Venezuela recognised it as part of Guyana’s EEZ until very recently.

    After Maduro mismanaged one of the most resource rich countries into basically a failed state, he’s now trying to cling to power the tried and true way: stoking a pointless war with its neighbour.

    Best case he’s trying to rally support for a 2025 election, or use the threat of as an excuse to say the election. Worst case he’s gonna do a Putin and actually start a war. Not a bad time for it either, whilst the world is already distracted with Ukraine and and Gaza.

    Here’s a decent video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ7fTSirNDs


  • I don’t know, your #2 reason doesn’t seem to stand up to reality.

    I don’t know where you are, but where I am (UK) you can go on any high street (in most towns there will be an area where most shops are, think strip mall in the US) and you will find at least a couple shops that fix and sell electronics - primarily smartphones, but also vacuum cleaners, TVs, computers, games consoles.

    Pretty much all of them are locally-run and are, I assume, profitable in spite of every electronics manufacturer trying to run them out of business.

    I say I assume because they wouldn’t be everywhere if they weren’t.

    I’ve had phones fixed by them, they offer warranties, reasonable prices, only had an issue once and it was put right after a tiny bit of back and forth.

    I think by “we can’t afford it” you mean “capitalism hasn’t yet found a way to centralise the profits and run the small business owners out of business”.


  • Having followed SpaceX for a very long time, I think that Elon kinda figured early on how to get engineers excited for a lofty goal and give them sufficient room to fail and innovate, whilst squeezing every drop of work out of them.

    So he was a good hype man for things he broadly understood and he was willing to put loads of money into making it successful.

    But following a long tradition of people who are actually excellent in a narrow field, he convinced himself that he can translate this into imposing weird and frankly really stupid philosophy onto the world. The Bloombergs and the Carsons of the world have already failed at this, happily it looks like he will too. Not that he’ll learn anything from it, just hope he goes away and stops trying.


  • I’m not sure how they got to that conclusion, but we can kinda guess.

    The tongue is PACKED with blood vessels, so in case of any damage it can get tons of nutrients to fix itself. But this takes a very energy-intensive.

    So if the rest of the body would have the same density of blood vessels, we’d need drastically more energy to feed all of that.

    And I guess they’re asserting that all else being the same we wouldn’t be able to ingest or process sufficient food to keep that going.

    It’s a bit of a strange argument though, I’m going far outside of my physiology understanding, but you’d have to imagine that had we evolved such advanced healing capabilities, we’d have also evolved the means to feed them. And OP underestimates just how much food someone can eat. As someone dealing with an ED, I can tell you that you can easily triple your calorie intake (though whether that’s sufficient I wouldn’t be able to say…).

    All in I’d look forward to OP defending their assertion.