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Comment by scarab92 | Hacker News Reader

> Universal healthcare, social welfare, consumer protection, environmental regulations.

This is a strawman. Musk isn't attacking these things.

What he is attacking is excessive regulations imposed on new technology, often pre-emptively or without significant demonstrable harm. Regulations that aren't solving any real world problem but exist for political reasons. To allow politicians to message "we'll protect you from the Americans" and to allow regulators to continue having a reason to be employed.

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Why is Musk attacking these things in the EU? Why does he care what we do?

Why did he start DOGE? To enrich, empower or to actually fix something?

Given recent news: the steal money from New York. Very empowering.

Most big picture thinkers are like this.

They see problems that exist and want to fix them, regardless of whether they are occurring in their own backyard or more broadly.

His companies also employ tens of thousands of people in Europe. 11.500 in Berlin alone, and many multiples of that within the supply chain.

He isn't a big picture thinker, he's not even a thinker. Show me a coherent "big picture" thought of his. Or I could show you many things he thinks are very deep any moderately bright teenager would be ashamed to claim.

And he acts the opposite as you describe. His factory is causing problems because he didn't even think about where to get the water from.

https://tnfd.global/knowledge-bank/teslas-reliance-on-ground...

No one asked for his assistance. No one accepted it. At that point it isn't assistance, it's pestering. Maybe even harassment depending on how long it occurs

If Musk wants "zero regulations as a baseline" for the US you can call that an educated prediction.

And he seems to be just generally attacking all sorts of things he has no clue about, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996385

And every time I have heard him talk it was just a gish gallop, not to mention the utterly idiotic (and false) stuff he boosts on Twitter. I haven't even seen anything that would lead me to believe he could seriously think about these things, not to mention showing any evidence he ever did.

Zero regulations is a sensible baseline. You then add any regulations with a clear demonstrated need.

Otherwise, you're saying the baseline should be to keep regulations even if they aren't needed.

> “Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

> we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation

"we can always add it back in" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976708

That sounds.. obvious?

Regulations should need to justify their existance, they shouldn't just exist by default without a reason.

they don't "exist by default" or without reason

Zero regulations is an asinine position. The vast bulk of regulations that were added over the past hundred years were in response to demonstrable harms. If someone wants to get rid of an existing regulation, it is up to them to show why it is no longer needed.

>You then add any regulations with a clear demonstrated need.

The US has, for 300 years. I'm sure countries within the EU have an even longer history of that.

>you're saying the baseline should be to keep regulations even if they aren't needed.

No, they already proved their needs. The onus is on the new plantiffs to disprove the needs. No one's done that so far.

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