Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

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> 3. Elon Musk and his Tunnel Boring Machine

We've had these for ages and Elon has not made any advances in tunneling technology despite hundreds of millions of dollars and however-many years invested.

> 4. Elon Musk and his Flamethrower

Elon Musk and his $500 roofing torch.

> Elon Musk and his Self Driving Car

Elon Musk and his moving goalposts...

Of course, there is also "Elon Musk and his Cult of Personality", which is how he can slap a brand-name on a roofing torch and get people to run around calling it a "flamethrower", and how he can get away with calling a system that still requires human supervision "feature-complete full self driving".

This also contributes to his being able to get away with publicly calling an international hero a pedophile, just because they had the gall to question "Elon Musk and his Cave Rescue Submarine".

I give Elon a lot of respect for what he has done with 1 and 2, but I think his visions would be better served by less hero-worship and more serious people holding him to account.

The guy insulted musk and got insulted back. He didn't really "question" the usefulness in a benign way. Generally speaking in life, if you're an asshole people are going to be assholes back. You can be a hero and an asshole at the same time, there's no need to promote the diver to sainthood.

Musk was an asshole too, but he didn't start it.

The divers spent days risking their lives to save the kids, and some Silicon Valley fucker with zero field knowledge pretends he's going to save the day with some high-tech gizmo. You can understand the guys were a bit upset and told him to shove his gadget up his ass. Also calling someone a pedophile is a heavy and potentially dangerous accusation. Like is or not, Musk was the bad guy here.

That's a ridiculous outlook. Musk might be misguided, but its not like he swooped in and took control of the rescue operation and put kids' lives in danger and forced a sovereign nation to use his submarine. He made a thing that may or may not work and brought it to a place and said they could use it.

The diver doing that is like winning the world cup and then during your post-game interview you use that time to talk about how bad your teammates that sat on the bench are. Maybe he's technically correct about Musk's submarine not working, but he's still classless and an asshole. Its hard to imagine that Musk would be upset if there was some good PR for Tesla as a result of this but its also not hard to imagine that a part of him legitimately wanted to do something that he thought would help.

Pedophile in that context was not intended as a serious allegation that the diver sexually assaulted kids. It was a generic insult that just plays off of the stereotype that western expats that live in Thailand are going there primarily for underage prostitutes.

Its also ridiculous because the divers were immediately praised and applauded by the entire world. Why would they even give a shit if other people showed up to help and they (the divers) were the ones that got to run the operation? It was a pretty positive event where some people saved some children from certain death and in the aftermath 2 grown men decided to turn a positive thing into a petty argument.

A single person should not be referred to as “divers” and “guys”.

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