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Comment by openasocket | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to the dismantling of USAID and US foreign aid. Not hypothetical deaths in the future, people who have died in the last year because Musk cut off their supply of medication and nutrition.

Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!

And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.

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We're killing a lot more people than that; if we'd just tax the rich at 80% and send all that money abroad, we'd save millions more. Failure to do that is mass murder, the same as decreasing foreign aid funding; that is your thesis, right, that it's mass murder?

Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.

The deaths happened because the funding was yanked immediately without time to reorganize and re-source funding elsewhere. Rather than being slowly wound down with with enough warning time.

Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.

Proposing false dichotomies isn't really an argument. You've created a strawman. There is a balance to be struck.

No, he simply extrapolated this idiotic reasoning to its absurd conclusion.

How? By that method you could compare a pebble to the moon and say you were extrapolating.

The only way you would do that is if you didn’t understand the shape/limits of the structures being compared.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-ever...

I think it's pretty likely it would have been mostly left alone if not for Musk. No one was asking for PEPFAR to be killed, for example - it's one of the few things in Washington with near unanimous bipartisan goodwill and it was actually a point of pride and prestige for Republicans.

Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.

What do you think the purpose of USAID was, out of curiosity?

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