"The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly."
Absolutely amazing
Absolutely amazing
- Don't have anything to hide.
- At least use Firefox.
- Nah.
Sorry but no, it's definitly apathy.
Take Elon Musk for example. His vision of the future is more compelling than anything I hear any politician of any political party in the USA (or most other nations) putting forward. I find the standard issue right-wing vision of the future repugnant and the standard issue left-wing vision completely impractical and divorced from reality. (Aspects of it are repugnant too, but much less so than the right.)
What other non-billionaire visions of the future does humanity have? Xi Jinping's smile-or-die panopticon? Putin's theocratic mafia state?
The billionaires are leading humanity by default because they're on balance the only class of people offering practical workable visions of the future that are at least incrementally better than the present.
However, never underestimate Congress's undying political will to give bucketloads of American taxpayer dollars and money the government borrowed to rich people with no accountability.
Really makes you think…
NASA could have built a reusable space launch system better than the shuttle, but they didn't. That's exactly my point about billionaires leading by default. It took a billionaire because nobody else did it.
Even if that is his vision, it won't work. You can't be king of a frontier for very long unless your rule is very competent, minimal, and low-cost. The tighter your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
In general, people living in hostile environments develop higher levels of trust and social responsibility. When you live closely with people, where everyone's choices impact everyone else, when a single person intentionally screwing things up could doom the entire community, you get societies that are pretty much the polar opposite of the archetypal billionaire libertarian vision.
Elon hasn't talked a lot about the social aspects of a Mars settlement. Maybe he doesn't care and figures that's up to the people who go there and his mission is just to get people there. Maybe he would agree with you and that's the point. Who knows.
I highly doubt he's naive enough to think the social outcome of a Mars settlement would be some standard issue Earthly political outcome or one that would exclusively favor him. If he is that naive he will be disappointed.
It's their responsibility to say no, and they failed in that job.
I ask because in-state tuition in California and Washington is so high that you could afford a full time PhD student tutor with it.
No, the university is responsible for providing safe housing for the students, and if they accepted this lunatic's plan, they would be breaching that trust.
When parents and students look for colleges, they assume a certain level of due diligence has been done for them, and they will be leaving their teenager in a minimally safe environment. You can't let people off the hook because of some right-wing idea of "freedom".
[1] In April 2014, during a budget crisis, Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (sourced from Lake Huron and the Detroit River) to the Flint River. Residents complained about the taste, smell, and appearance of the water. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.
How is this even allowed from an engineering perspective? Unless his design and blueprints are perfect, which I highly doubt, it’s insane that no changes could be made. Is this common practice in architecture? I’ve never seen anything like it.
And the investor will probably be dead before anybody can see the effect on students.
Michigan: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
Stanford: https://g.co/kgs/TbYAFH
Honestly, it sounds like he just "optimized" the heck out of a residence, and part of the tradeoffs is that on average people would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. His Michigan building houses twice as many students in the same footprint as competing plans, and the competing plans used shared rooms. Admittedly, these aren't really ideal for COVID though.
As an aside, one of his other interesting architectural quirks is that any shared women's bathrooms are generally much larger than the men's, to deal with differences in how they're used.
This Munger monstrosity is positively distopian. What happened to Charlie's wisdom?
I'd understand this as his cunning plan to get richer then.
Why am I not surprised that Charles "The-most-important-thing-is-getting-your-first-100000-dollars. Work-multiple-jobs-skip-meals-do-what-you-have-to-that's-the-investing-entry-fee-to-wealth" Munger architected a large prison for students?
Could you share the background for this?
A blog [1] says the argument goes something like this: “The first $100,000 is a b*tch, but you gotta do it [...] I don’t care what you have to do—if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.”
[1] https://fourpillarfreedom.com/charlie-munger-the-first-10000...
Apparently from his youth, his Dad had a friend that ran a shoe button factory and managed to corner the entire market of shoe buttons. Then in his personal life went on to be a know it all about everything else on the planet.
Munger and Buffet both are pretty transparent about being so didactic though. If you don't want the strings attached to the money, say no.