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Comment by alliecat | Hacker News Reader

And absolutely nobody was surprised.

I wonder what a donation of the equivalent value of that thing would have achieved?

i wonder how much better the world would be if instead of jerking off you spent that time working at a soup kitchen feeding the homeless and hungry.

I wonder if you donated the time spent writing your comment to a worthy cause what could have been achieved? /s

That line of reasoning is snarky, but not particularly useful.

I have no problem with the OP's line of reasoning.

It's obvious that Elon Musk has a larger than normal ego. I'm sure that this hands-on attempt to help probably greatly satisfied that ego but it seems reasonable that a monetary contribution could have done as much or more good while also appearing less selfish.

There was absolutely no reason for Musk himself to actually go to the cave either. Send some expert engineers along with your sub, sure, but I have no idea what help he thought he would be providing in person.

That's not the reasoning I critiqued.

You can apply the ole "oh, but if only said human effort was directed toward charity" line of thinking to every activity, which means it isn't a very useful line of thinking.

The actual line of reasoning being applied is not that, though - it's a very specific case where effort was already applied toward charity but a different kind of effort could have been applied for greater effect had the applier been solely interested in helping and not inflating their own ego.

I don't think it is at all clear that an engineering solution here is a priori a bad idea. It is possible that an organization that can land rockets standing up has better than average engineers.

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