Your description of Elmo applies to several other billionaires who have somehow avoided quixotic hyper-destructive rampages through American politics. I’m all for wired funny, but not when it comes with this much carnage.
I'm not sure who the whole 'Elmo' thing is for -- more than anything I cringe at the person saying it, rather than thinking less of Elon or whatever the hope is. Like 'drumpf', or the whole small hands thing, it just comes across like a redditism that escaped confinement.
Is the hope that Elon or fans of his read it and get offended? I doubt they care much, and I fail to see the point of it.
I use it to indicate my derision, and that I refuse to take this person seriously. That's the point. How the reader reacts is beside the point, to me.
Diminishing names used for delegitimization are not something reddit invented. Calling George W. Bush "dubya", Barack Obama "barry", or Richard Nixon "look it up" are all great examples of a time-honored tradition.
Most people don’t even know what regulatory capture really means. There’s no “brand” to rally around and I don’t know how you’d go about building one.
And without the concept spread through the population, where would you find the grass roots support you’d need for resisting the avalanche of interest-group pushback?
“Draining the swamp” or “revolving door” were sorta in the neighborhood, but still ineffective and counterproductive.
You’d expect the “unreasonable man” of Europe to be behind but stable and decent, whereas these days much of Europe can’t maintain living standards or political stability.
There’s also an argument to be made that China is putting in a very solid performance in a very reasonable manner. See: methodical capture of global EV+energy markets, soft power expansion into the global south, cold-eyed deflation of financial bubbles, 5 year plans, and so on. At this rate, I’m not sure that the freedom and unreason loving “man” that is the US will be able to compete either.
> whereas these days much of Europe can’t maintain living standards or political stability
Those are the side effects of Europe trying to offset its fertility rate with immigration, yet failing to explicitly address the enculturation tension.
It's remarkably how people so smart in one area (demographic issues and solutions) can flounder so badly in another (addressing cultural friction with immigrants).
Especially considering history has "a few" examples of exactly this same thing, although possibly Americans have more experience in modernity.
The cultural friction is not a real issue except for the extreme right. The real issues are the same as everywhere: standard of living is going down for younger people while wealth is being concentrated in fewer individuals. Those wealthy individuals are the ones who benefit from promoting this immigration/cultural friction theory.
It is a real issue, because it's human nature. Groups don't like outsiders.
Pretending that isn't human nature is why anti-immigrant parties keep attracting surprising support in elections.
And that tension shouldn't be swept under the rug and ignored via the 'it's just the far right' excuse.
It's a thing. It needs to be addressed. Which doesn't necessarily mean implementing anti-immigrant policies, but does at least mean some form of address (e.g. government support for enculturation, advertising benefits of immigration, etc).
Rocket Lab is also taking a more methodical and less iterative approach with Neutron, which should be ready some time next year. If they make that work well, that will be another point in favor of a methodical approach.
Part of my self-administered IT education in my early 20s was to feed my film nerdery through exquisite data hoarding. Automation, NASs, media servers, all of it.
Curiously, I found that the better I got, the less movies I actually watched. It became more about collecting than engaging.
I think this is a corollary to your point: vastly increasing access and reducing our objects of desire to a standardized neatly storable form can easily divert us into hoarding behavior, to the detriment of actual engagement with what’s being hoarded.
I found the way to square the circle of music hoarding is to place your player on full-library shuffle. Music is unique because you can enjoy it while doing other things, such as spamming Hacker News. Movies cannot be appreciated with such divided attention.
But maybe some prefer that? These rich guys who never seem to have long, fulfilling relationships, who's to say they seek long term relationships? (I wouldn't know, I'm not one of them!)
Ditto with the women who like them.
You can, after all, delete all the other games from your emulator, or your entire data hoard except one document etc. Somehow that doesn't seem appealing either, does it?
Ending a lot of sentences with a question here I know, but I honestly don't think I've got this figured out.
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