Because, I don't think Musk had ever shown issues understanding or even precisely manipulating people's sentiments with bare hands which some of us struggle even with tools, while also there being countless examples him showing lack of understanding of laws, order, code, all such brittle dehumanized systems in general.
All his successes owes to his mastery of orchestrating humans as animals, not machines or humans as intelligent constructs. Why are we nearly dead set that it's opposite of that?
He's long turned about face with that, but that goodwill can die really, really hard (only took until now for Wall Street to very slowly start pulling out). As we see with Donald Trump somehow being relevant some 4 decades after his celebrity fame for a national election.
>Why are we nearly dead set that it's opposite of that?
My impression is that Musk knew to surround himself with good people. Be it coincidence, a Charisma check, or simply throwing cash at them, those people clearly did amazing things and he was the face of it all.
This is more or less the opposite, and his crude behavior navigating government IMO could not have gone worse. He had at least 2 years to sow the seeds and he's instead taking "Drill Baby, Drill" a bit too seriously. I could be very wrong and underestimating him. But he feels more like someone who demands the spotlight, not a mastermind with a precise vision. Those good people are not around him anymore; Trump sure as hell doesn't have a vision past tax cuts for billionaires.
But this audience is more diverse in it's views and is perhaps more willing to challenge it's idols and leaders. Keeping this audience on your side is a constant dialogue where you are constantly challenged and it's a symbiotic-adversarial relationship that results in a stronger whole. Only by getting challenged in a constructive discussion can truly great ideas be born.
But this is hard work and in some sense annoying. Inevitably he gets surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, because these people butter his ego, and comes to realize that there's an audience around who will unquestionably eat up anything their leader says irrespective of it's truthfulness. An audience who doesn't care whether their leaders are good, just that the leader is on their side.
And thus we find ourselves in the current situation, with an entire establishment in the US who will happily broadcast broad faced lies, but these lies are only for their own audience who believes them without question. Or they just don't care at all, because it's not about the truth, it's only about tribalism.
Its about assuming most people operate on dogma and heuristics. This is extremely true in my opinion.
By making this assumption, you dispel bad practices and behaviors that might have built up within an organization. Even more importantly you can reveal why certain chesterton’s fences exist.
It falls to pieces when people with this mindset attempt to work up against the constraints of physics, or other unchanging limits. Those limits can be constructed on, and relied upon. Going back to first principles in these cases inevitably results in massive losses in the repetition of the uncountable quiet failure-corners of history.
We will find out which one we are dealing with.
Or it can be just arrogance. (In fact, even when it's reasonable, it probably also contains some arrogance...)
No, this is a common fallacy.
The main reason to get crazy rich and successful is statistics: be lucky. I.e., accidentally do the successful things. And usually starting rich helps, so you have the opportunities.
Crazy success is not a measure for capability. There is no correlation. Yes, it is sad, so despite this, the fallacy is a great motivation for many.
Or the tax code...
>sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch.
Many people don't understand this and are totally, fully incapable of understanding this simple concept, hence all the opposition
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
Do you have another solution to that, or do you not care about that in a dog-eat-dog way?
> "My answer would be the career bureaucrats"
Why is this used as a slur? There's such a thing as a career diplomat, and we'd hope they would learn more about the country they were diplomat-ing in over that career - who can make things happen in the government, how the consulate can get things done, build relationships with people in power. Similar with a career bureaucrat in principle, having a head full of details about which supply chains are reliable and resilient, which people are experts in border issues or international currency issues or state laws vs. federal laws, building relationships with them.
It's not how it pans out.
>Property taxes impose a cost to the ownership of a property which disincentivizes leaving it empty, which is better for almost everyone else except the property owner.
All that will disproportionately affect the poor not the rich who can actually afford the taxes.
>Do you have another solution to that, or do you not care about that in a dog-eat-dog way?
I do. Property in one thing that I think should be equally divided among individuals, with individuals being able to use/rent in whatever manner they please within certain confines (lots of assumptions here and lots of if and buts, but it's huge discussion).
>> "My answer would be the career bureaucrats"
>Why is this used as a slur?
It is intended to be a slur, infact the word bureaucrat itself is a slur. Being a bureaucrat is a negative skill or a parasite etc. unlike a lot of other specializations. Ofcourse exceptions may exist. Personal questions: have you done your taxes beyond simple salaried income tax? Have you bough/sold property? have you run a small/big business? have you run a payroll? Alternatively are you familiar with the amount of complexity introduced by the govt in the questions I asked you?
That's interesting, and rather goes up against the free markety ideas that the people with the most valuable use for land/property should be able to buy as much of it as they want from people with less valuable uses (who can sell it at market rates). I am interested and do wonder how that might work, and if it would work. Although I note that thing_you_like is allowed to be nuanced and complex, and thing_you_dislike must be bad because it's complex.
> All that will disproportionately affect the poor not the rich who can actually afford the taxes.
That happens when a speeding ticket is a fixed $100. Norway can give speeding fines up to 10% of the driver's annual salary. A bad property tax disproportionately hurts the poor, not all property taxes.
Your parent comment "Perhaps the most important question to ask is not who will gain - rather who stands to lose?" is the entire reason taxes get complicated - because every change is a change that someone gains and someone else loses. Any thing which is paid for by taxes has an argument over who should pay the tax, and how much of it; do parents pay tax for schools? Society benefits from more educated people, so does everyone pay? Is it an income tax because people who benefitted more from education can earn more? Is it part of property tax because family homes need schools built nearby? Solve for something all councillors/senators agree on - after they negotiate, for every thing and every slider.
> Personal questions: ...
They would be relevant if I had said the tax code was in any way optimal, good, efficient, should not be changed, or should not/could not be improved. My position is not that. It is if we give the greedy fat kid free reign to rewrite the rationing system the only expected result is all the food ends up on their plate and none on anybody else's.
We've seen Musk taking union busting actions, we've seen Musk's daughter accuse him of abuse, we've seen Tesla and SpaceX benefit from billions of taxpayer funding while Tesla arranged to pay no income tax on its billions of income, Musk has demonstrated lack of caring for the interests of other humans, the expected outcome of him rewriting the tax code is that he and his companies pay no tax and therefore others pay all of it. We've also seen years of Musk dashing off an unworkable ill-thought-out idea off the top of his head, so after "I pay no tax" the remainder is probably some pre-planned maximally self-interested tax code written by Peter Thiel et al, or some dashed-out-in-ten-minutes wildly unbalanced hopelessly unworkable napkin tweet.
I would like to see laws implemented with test conditions for how we will know if they are working, with a mandatory sunset period for reviewing them and if they aren't meeting the test conditions they automatically expire. I would like to see the tax code be mandatory computer-implementable with low tax filing complexity as a priority consideration.
> "It is intended to be a slur, infact the word bureaucrat itself is a slur. Being a bureaucrat is a negative skill or a parasite etc."
One person's bureacratic parasite is another person's necessary management. I enjoy Yes Minister[1] and am annoyed by the waste it parodies and mocks, but also acknowledge that a necessary and significantly sized part of any large system is the organization and management and implementation of the system itself; the UK's NHS is often criticised for having too many administrators, and at the same time for not having enough administrators to be able to do the work of organizing and making it more efficent on top of the work of keeping it running.
The second system effect[2], "scrap it and we'll start again and do it better", is a well known anti-pattern[3]; the cost of scrapping and rewriting the tax code, all the people through the Inland Revenue, all the accountants and lawyers who need updating, all the forms and paperwork and computer systems and reports and analysis which need refactoring, recreating, translating, documenting, explaining, staff training - staff hiring - the effort and cost is non-trivial, all on the unsupported dream "we will do it better next time".
Your original comment: ">sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch." why not simply switch that around? First come up with a 'reasonable' tax code from scratch, put it into a bill, and because it's reasonable senators will all support it, then afterwards the old one can be thrown away? Obviously that hasn't happened, and surely the reason is that there is no reasonable alternative that everyone agrees on, and the only way to throw it away and come up with an alternative is to have a single authority force one through and expect it to be one which helps them and their friends and hurts others. Guarding against that is why we have Democracy not Dictatorship in the first place(!) even though Democracy is often inefficient and ineffective.
[1] https://archive.org/details/yes-minister-1980-1984 - a British satire / comedy from the 1980s set where a newly elected government minister finds he's been made head of the Department of Administrative Affairs, a department of 23,000 administrators. Example scene/situation is the new hospital with 500 'seriously overworked' administrative staff and no medical staff or patients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
[3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
While the general impression of free market that is commonly touted does imply what you say, even in its current form people don't carry free market ideas to it's extreme: for example someone could argue that in a true free market you could kill your competitor to gain an edge.
>Although I note that thing_you_like is allowed to be nuanced and complex, and thing_you_dislike must be bad because it's complex.
There are areas where complexity may be needed and not avoidable. (for example a rocket ) . Something similar goes for the land division that I talked about. What I can assure you is that if a land division is not considered, the complexity ( and associated atrocities) are magnified in other areas like the tax code.
>I would like to see laws implemented with test conditions for how we will know if they are working, with a mandatory sunset period for reviewing them and if they aren't meeting the test conditions they automatically expire.
As much as I agree with you on this I don't think it'll happen in practice, simply because most humans are completely incapable of even conceiving those kind of ideas. If you are a developer like me, you are well about the average IQ - so what may seem trivial to you and me is not for the common man or the common elected representative that he elects.
> tax code was in any way optimal
The tax code especially for income tax and property tax, can never be optimal, or if it's optimal it's only for a short time. Because by it's very nature it's predatory. (it's another huge topic as to what can be taxed)
>One person's bureacratic parasite is another person's necessary management.
This mostly true of private companies, less so for a government that writes check to itself.
>I enjoy Yes Minister[1] and am annoyed by the waste it parodies and mocks,
While you did not answer my questions which were directed to you as a person( I assume that most of your answers would be 'no'). I'm glad that you're familiar with "Yes Minister". (I had seen it a few decades back.). Anyway I'm arguing for minimal government and for minimizing any scope creep of the powers that the government may have. Easier said than done. (the mostly legalized and easy to obtain gun ownership in US is one example, which if I interpret correctly was intended to keep the government in check)
"first principles" doesn't mean "go back to 2 + 2 and reinvent the rest of math".