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Yep, this article is a desperate cry from an obnoxious hack to assert his relevance. See also: Cory Doctorow.

I did not mean that. 'cstross is smart, writes very well and remains relevant. But I strongly disagree with the outlook of this essay, and the overall vibe I've been getting from his blog in the past couple years; I also find it depressing that it seems to be increasingly representative of the "tech industry counter-culture", for lack of a better name.

It doesn’t feel like he’s shitting on SpaceX. His point is still valid, however, in that we should not divert resources from, say, COVID vaccines for everyone to immortality for the über-rich.

We saw how social networks were used to destabilise democracies we took as invulnerable to such meddling. We saw how placing the accumulation of capital over all things including the welfare of our species can lead to dangerous priorities.

This is a false dichotomy. Vast resources have been poured into the development of COVID vaccines - and it worked!

There are 8 billion people on this planet, we can do more than one thing at a time.

> We should not divert resources from vaccines to immortality

Is there any risk of that? Probably the biggest challenge vaccination faces is uptake, there's no shortage of funding.

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