It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.
It's said that Starship Troopers failed to do as well in USA because people thought it was pro-fascist propaganda ... it doesn't seem possible that could genuinely be the case.
I remember _movie critics_ clutching their pearls in disgust at the fascism. I was an autistic teen just out of a village and even I could see the satire. To this day I have no idea if they were reviewing in good faith, it still feels so far-fetched.
Starship Troopers (the movie) is a terrible example of satire because it fails to show anything substantially bad. When you present a society that's more ethical than real life, nobody's going to care if some people wear uniforms that look a bit like Nazi uniforms.
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
The only hung I see about the asteroid was that Carmen’s collision (caused by her showing off) knocked the rock which caused it to hit Earth, where originally it may well have missed.
Seems reasonable (although clearly not the intent of the story and not a deliberate “false flag”)
This is all intentional. The film is emulating the type of film that would be produced by this fascist regime, of course it isn't going to include proof of the fascists being wrong. But we also don't see any evidence in support of their claims of an "existential threat" beyond the fascists claiming there is one. And since it's from the fascist perspective, the lack of evidence justifying their actions ends up supporting the idea that there is no real justification for their actions.
The movie's goal is showing the attractiveness of fascism and showing that people like you are incredibly open to fascist ideologies as long as the fascists have a scary "other" to put forward as an existential threat regardless of how real that threat truly is.
There definitely is. No one on screen looks into camera and says this directly, but the whole recurring "Would you like to know more?" bit is supposed to tip the viewer off that what they're watching is a product of the government's propaganda efforts.
I truly don't know how you can watch this [1] and conclude we're meant to fully trust them as the 100% honest truth.
The "would you like to know more" segments are inner nested stories. Those actually are presented as in-universe video, and qualify as epistolary narrative. But to claim that the movie as a whole is anti-fascist satire relies on the assertion that the whole movie is epistolary, which goes against the narrative conventions of film-making. Judging only by what we see on screen, we have to take it at face value. To do allow otherwise permits bizarre interpretations of any fiction you like, because you can always claim it's unreliable narration.
To differentiate between the potentially unreliable in-universe material and the conventional narrative of the rest. There's no on-screen evidence to justify a second level of nesting.
That confuses me because you seemingly aren't disagreeing with anything in the "unreliable in-universe material". The primary difference I see between those segments and the rest of the movie is simply tone.
The tone marks the difference between epistolary narration (which by convention may be unreliable) and omniscient narration (which by convention is always reliable). I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen. What we actually see is a society that's more ethical than any real world society in times of war. If Verhoeven didn't want us to believe that then he shouldn't have used the omniscient narration of a conventional action movie. Any movie that relies on external sources to convey its message has failed as a movie.
>I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen.
Poe's law suggests that what you're asking for is impossible, there will always be people unable to read sarcasm or parody. Knowing this, I believe Verhoeven included those "Would you like to know more?" segments as the equivalent of a ;-) or /s to indicate his intent. I'm sorry to be blunt, but obviously some of us were able to understand his message so attributing your own inability to see that message on a failure of Verhoeven and not yourself comes off as self-centered.
He could have introduced a second level of narrative nesting with a single title card at the beginning. Something like "United Citizen Federation presents: Heroes of the Bug Wars" would have made it clear. Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
>Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
Which brings us full circle back to my first reply to you, there is no evidence in the movie either way on the justification for their actions. You're reading that we must trust the fascists in the film due to film conventions is just as reliant on outside knowledge as my argument that we shouldn't trust the fascists in the film because they are fascists.
The evidence is shown on screen. We see the asteroid fired at Earth. We see Buenos Aires destroyed. We see the bugs killing the humans. If you call this unreliable narration it becomes impossible to discuss any fiction at all, because once you reject basic narrative conventions you can make up any nonsense you like and nobody can argue against it.
Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts. You could call it "vibe watching". If you look at what's actually happening, following the standard conventions of motion picture story-telling, the characters are not fascists. And if the director intended them to be fascists but omitted anything that would make that clear, he shouldn't be surprised when people watch it like a normal action movie.
No, we don't. The bugs have no technology. How could they send an asteroid from light-years away with enough speed and accuracy to hit Earth on any reasonable timeframe? It's not even a good lie. It's a story that strains credulity the second you actually think about its logistics. The only reason you believe it is that characters in the movie say it.
>We see Buenos Aires destroyed.
Sure, but asteroids also have natural origins. The government coopts the disaster for their own ends in an obvious mirroring of the Reichstag fire. The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what the crisis can be used to justify.
>We see the bugs killing the humans.
Sure, after the humans invade the bugs home. If you go on a hike, find a beehive, and then start poking it with a stick, no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
>Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts.
The government portrayed in the movie is fascistic because it shows a society that is entirely governed by military might and structure. The classroom scenes at the beginning of the movie discuss the failure of democracy and how that led to veterans taking control through force. We are also repeatedly told that basic rights of citizenship are only awarded to veterans. When they're at boot camp and all going around explaining their reasons for joining the military, one person says she wants to start a family and military service is the best path to getting a license for it. This is a highly structured and totalitarian society ruled by a military class. How would you describe that if it isn't "fascism"?
Once again, you seem to be guilty of the same thing you're accusing me of doing. The only evidence that this isn't a fascist society is the surface-level details of things like a bunch of happy high school students. Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
The bugs are shown firing projectiles to orbit. This is a setting with FTL travel; it's clearly not hard sci-fi. By the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies, the bugs are capable of firing asteroids at Earth.
>The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant
It's critically important to the ethical justification for military response. According to the information actually presented in the movie, the destruction was deliberate murder of millions of civilians. Any other interpretation is fan-fiction.
>no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
They'd blame them for killing everybody they know. And that initial provocation was not the fault of the United Citizen Federation.
>Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
It has objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society.
I refuse to believe that you are actually engaging with the issues being discussed if you're claiming that needing a license to have children is "objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society." Your stubbornness has bested my patience, so I'm done here.
I support reproductive freedom. I oppose slavery. My opposition to slavery is stronger than my support for reproductive freedom. When there's a conflict between the two, reproductive freedom has to be sacrificed.
Anybody who didn't support raising a slave army to liberate the Chinese from their one-child policy implicitly agreed with me.
It's not clear to me that the bugs have FTL indeed we don't see them use such in movie or book. Moreover sending a single small rock makes zero sense FTL and knowledge of humanities only major world would have allowed them to wipe out the threat in a stroke.
You could A) warp in a rock of sufficient velocity that a small one destroys life on the planet or B) warp in and move a bigger rock in system.
It only makes sense as a false flag by the humans.
You're ignoring genre conventions. Every soft scifi movie is nonsense if you look at it from the perspective of real-life physics. Sending a single rock via unspecified FTL to attack Earth makes as much sense as the human-piloted fighter spacecraft in Star Wars. The aliens are capable of bombarding Earth across interstellar space because it makes for a good visual spectacle. Watch (or more likely read) hard scifi instead if you need everything to make logical sense.
>What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?
Ding ding ding. Endemic to fascism, among other things, are heavy State involvement in the curation of, shall we say, "the corpus culturále". Even in the United States, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, there were certain lines you could not cross and still end up on broadcast television. Renditions of the Government, Police/Authorities, or the Courts in an unflattering light was an express lane to non-syndication. Go ahead, look for syndicated media that that highlighted the People's struggle against a corrupt Government where another part of the Government isn't also complicit in "cracking down on the bad apples" (thereby distancing itself from being party to the dysfunction, and reinforcing it's own Supreme legitimacy). No points if it's not in the United States. We're great at syndicating everyone else's problems. Not so much our own. Point is, those network decency standards were, in essence, formulations of what the governing authority considers invalid art. Art, on the other hand, is all encompassing. Ironically, mrob, you're pulling from the fascist art critic's handbook to dismiss the possibility of the work of satire being a fascistly produced piece of media consumption into and unto itself, by doing exactly what a fascist state does. Referencing guidelines and norms that lay out the boundaries of acceptable artistic practice.
In reality, art is as much the characteristics and execution of the workpiece itself, the cinema Starship Troopers, as it is the collective viewer's response to it. In essence, both you and the other poster have equal claims to artistic merit. Though I tend to side with the "this is fascist af" side of the argument given that despite the limitations of the medium, it is very clearly illustrated that what the military junta says goes, period. States are not containers or facilitators of the monopoly on violence. They are incubators for collective action. By trimming down the collective, and setting price of admission to "do our bidding or no representation"; you undeniably tread what in mid-20th century historical experience outlines as "the road to fascism". Disenfranchise the undesirable. Rule according to sensibilities of the desirables. Funnily enough, in it's own way, the U.S. of today is fascistic in that regard, given we absolutely adore the disenfranchisement of the felon, which seems more peppered through legal system than your Grandma's favorite spice.
I support the freedom to produce unconventional art. I'm just pointing out the empirical fact that if you produce a work of art that follows the conventions of a genre, people are going to judge it according to those genre conventions. That's how communication works, it's entirely normal and expected. If you want to subvert a genre, you have to actually subvert a genre. Just intending to do so is not enough.
For fellow HN'ers reading this epically long back and forth:
sig appears to be taking the more mainstream stance that Starship Troopers is satire. This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
mrob is part of the coalition (that included many critics when the film was released) that asserts the film has no elements that are satirical. I admit pointing to specifics that show the satire is tough. "Do you want to know more?" was the biggest tipoff to me.
But my point is that this argument is still going on in wider society. Lots of people say satire, and lots don't. But the balance say it is:
> Since its release, Starship Troopers has been critically re-evaluated, and it is now considered a cult classic and a prescient satire of fascism and authoritarian governance that has grown in relevance.
> This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
Not "refuted", "disputed". If you "dispute" something you disagree with it. If you "refute" something you not only disagree with it but you conclusively prove you are correct.
They certainly haven't done the latter.
This word is very frequently used incorrectly. Sometimes on purpose by people (such as politicians) who would love to be able to actually refute some allegation, but instead just disagree with it and say that they refute it.
Yeah, I just looked at the tags for the genre on IMDB, and confirmed "Satire" wasn't there for Starship Troopers, but is there for other satires.
Thanks for the language lesson. You're of course correct, but "refute vs. dispute" isn't one of my language pet peeves (like "less vs. fewer" is), so thanks for the correction.
I had no idea that people seriously think that the film isn't satire - I thought it was just people who had barely paid attention to it and weren't really giving it much thought that didn't spot the satirical elements throughout the film.
They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top.
Maybe part of it is due to how it was promoted - in the UK, it was promoted as satire, but I believe the USA promoted it as a straight action film.
> “I remember coming out of Heathrow and seeing the posters, which were great,” Verhoeven added. “They were just stupid lines about war from the movie. I thought, ‘Finally, someone knows how to promote this.’ In America, they promoted it as just another bang-bang-bang movie.”
> They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top
The big clue to me is when they visit the recruiter. The man is sitting at a desk and says something along the lines of "the galactic marines made me the man I am today", only for him to push back and reveal he's lost both his legs.
This seems.. wrong? From the director's mouth, confirming it's satire [0]
> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.
I really have no idea why Wikipedia says what it does. Someone should edit it.
I'm of the opinion that if you want to make a satire, intending to make a satire isn't enough, you have to actually make a satire. Others might disagree. The famous Roland Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" is relevant here:
The Mormon missionaries settled on a bug planet. Human's attempting to colonize worlds already inhabited and getting killed is not an existential risk or threat. Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
Assuming the Buenos Aires attack is from the bugs, it only happened after humans invaded multiple bug worlds. Since the bugs never seem to attempt to invade any human worlds, peace could have happened by just leaving the bugs alone and not attempting to take worlds from them. Paul Verhoeven grew up during WWII, so the idea of fascists exterminating the native population to make room, or Lebensraum, isn’t exactly a crazy idea.
>Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
The Mormons were not the United Citizen Federation, they were an independent group. The bugs indiscriminately attacked all humans in response.
>exterminating the native population to make room
The problem with this comparison is the bugs aren't humans. Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea (most people aren't vegans). Extending it to non-mammals is even more rare (most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming). Extending it to literally alien bugs, that don't even share the evolutionary history of Earth bugs with us, is an incredibly niche idea. And this situation is symmetrical, so the alien bugs almost certainly have the same attitude toward humans. There's no reason to think that peaceful coexistence is possible.
> Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea
It's actually pretty frequent to demonstrate deep empathy and give more importance to pets that to unrelated humans. Some also argue that humans can be morally inferior to others. Drawing a line between human and non-humans may be tempting but the opinons down there are very diverse. Just a few years back and a common agreement would be "Extending white-like moral weight to even non-white..."
> most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming
Of course they do! But found out it's the compromise with the lowest externalities. Most meat eater also don't like slaughterhouses but think it's a necessity.
> Extending it to literally alien bugs [...] is an incredibly niche idea
I bet if humanity do encounter alien bugs, this idea will be way more discussed. Moral is often somewhat put aside when engaging a fiction: Starship Troopers or Happy Tree Friends are perfect exemple. Most would's joke about that if that was real.
If humans encounter alien bugs that respond to a non-violent provocation by a minority group with attempted genocide of all humans, I hope that discussion would not be taken seriously. By your logic, taking antibiotics to cure a life-threatening infection is mass murder. The characters in the movie are obviously morally correct, and also obviously morally superior to real-life humans because they figured out a way to pull off large-scale group defense without resorting to slavery. Heinlein should be considered a great moral philosopher for coming up with the concept.
I can see only two possible reasons for disagreement. Either you are not actually addressing the movie itself, and are instead talking about an extended work of the movie plus the director's commentary, or you fundamentally disagree with me about human rights and do not consider slavery to be a serious problem.
You got it: I wasn't addressing the movie or the book itself but the general ideas about moral developed in your precedent post.
Antibiotics are obviously mass murder toward bacteria, that's exactly their function I guess? Using them to cure a life-threatening infection (bacterias) isn't seen as immoral by most, neither do I. May you point out what part makes you think otherwise?
I agree that slavery is not morally acceptable but i'm not sure to follow you point afterward. Perhaps you rank slavery as the worst moral practice and as some humans still enslave others, the movies's characters that don't are "morally superior"? That's a fair and rational view. I also see invasion, violence and a lot of sadism from the humans in that movie. I don't give them a moral advantage.
My whole understanding is close Slg post [0] about the fascist critique. It's also a very popular view: A quick search on internet return many articles in this frame and as you referenced "director's commentary":
1 > I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism
I like the quote that claims that as a science history is probably closer to animal husbandry than anything else.
Don't get me wrong I like history and think it a critical thing to study. but it is very telling to try ones hand at meta-history, the history of history, look to how the narrative of a historical subject changes through time and space.
An easy one is world war 2 documentaries. The difference in tone and focus of those done right after the cessation of hostilities compared to those done later is fascinating.
Just had the pleasure of listening to a Turing Award winner, and to answer a question about how to know what issues could come up. His response, "Read science fiction!" helps scientists imagine the future. I'll take his advice and
stick to my mostly fiction reading :)
Man, I’m the opposite. In the information age, in my leisure time reading books, I don’t want to learn any more facts and data points. I just want to enjoy a good story.
You'll see on HN itself how many people want to work on this surveillance. How many people want all white collar work eliminated by AI. How many people want a quick buck at anyone's expense, the morality be damned.
It’s important to note that fiction does not map to reality. It’s fiction. You cannot learn how the world works through fiction. It’s just the author’s ideas about the world in a narrative framework that may or may not be true.
I find it very frustrating when people confuse the two. Reading fiction doesn’t give you an interpretive lens for reality. Reading history does. Saying this is “just like when in Harry Potter / Star Wars / Star Trek x happened” is totally meaningless and not predictive of anything in the real world.
If we're looking globally, the huuge majority of our industry isn't part of manifesting the Torment Nexus. Unfortunately a lot of HN is, because interest in SV/VC strongly biases towards interest in achieving personal goals (including but not limited to financial earnings), over caring about building something that helps society.
And no, of course not everyone in SV is like that, and not every VC-funded company helps inch towards the Torment Nexus. But there's inherently a strong bias towards it.
its far simpler than that; not caring about what they've built if the check is big enough. because they've taught us that "if i don't build it, they'll just hire someone else. might as well be me that gets the money." but if there was solidarity or more regulation it'd be much less of a guarantee that these things would be built.
They should do some actually police work. This kind of "Papers, please" approach to immigration enforcement is dystopian. If you genuinely feel that illegal immigration is a problem that needs to be fixed, attack it systemically. Go through government, business, and housing records, find people who aren't here legally, and then go detain them. Don't just round people up based on nothing but their ethnicity and make them prove their innocence to you. It's inherently unAmerican, at least according to the ideals we like to claim we have (even if our history often falls short of those ideals).
>but they do arrest a significant amount of those as well.
Then arrest those people who commit crimes. If these people are guilty of something, why is ICE the one rounding them up? Why isn't the FBI or local police? If this is all motivated by a desire for lower crime, why are we treating it as an immigration issue instead of a crime issue?
> They should do some actually police work. This kind of "Papers, please" approach to immigration enforcement is dystopian.
Why it’s dystopian? It’s literally how it’s done in other places as well.
I agree that the government has to go through and punish those who employ illegal immigrants too to disincentivize unauthorized employment, but it doesn’t have to be only one avenue.
> Why isn't the FBI or local police?
I do not know where you live, but lately crimes in the US in many jurisdictions are not prosecuted, and repeat offenders are not punished. Coupled with the fact that many cities forbid their local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration, I am not sure how can local police do anything.
If an illegal immigrant committed a crime it is a failure of both local LEO and immigration. It doesn’t have to be only one.
I think a couple of these points are getting mixed together.
On the “crimes aren’t prosecuted” issue: that’s a broader criminal justice question, not really an immigration one. Whether someone is a citizen, documented immigrant, or undocumented immigrant, the question of prosecution policy is the same. If people think prosecutors are being too lenient, that’s something to take up locally through elections, town halls, etc. Immigration status doesn’t really change that dynamic.
On sanctuary policies or limits on local cooperation with immigration enforcement: the argument many cities make isn’t “ignore crime,” it’s “local police should focus on crime.” When local law enforcement is seen as an arm of immigration enforcement, it can discourage victims or witnesses from reporting crimes at all. So the policy goal is usually public safety, not shielding criminal behavior.
And on the last point: I agree. if an undocumented immigrant commits a crime, sure, there can be both a criminal justice component and an immigration component. But it helps to be clear about what problem we’re actually trying to solve. If the concern is crime, then that’s primarily a policing and prosecution issue regardless of who commits it. If the concern is immigration system design, then we should look at whether data actually shows disproportionate criminality among immigrants before framing it as an immigration enforcement failure.
> Immigration status doesn’t really change that dynamic.
Yes and no. It raises the question of how this specific crime could have been prevented. And it is very hard to argue against that with proper border enforcement, there is a good chance that some crime would have never happened.
The issue of social justice driven prosecution, while not related to the act of entering without inspection, just amplifies all these cases, and mixes the problem of lack of immigration enforcement with poorly thought out policies about prosecution and punishment.
What problem are we trying to solve here? I agree that we need to have proper border enforcement. But deporting people because they got a traffic citation[1]? Am I supposed to feel safer from "dangerous immigrants" now?
We need to solve the problem of prosecution and punishment of crimes. And we need to solve the problem of improper border enforcement. But this ain't the way. This just seems like a huge waste of resources.
And just another thought -- when non-white US citizens such as myself, my relatives, my in-laws, feel the need to carry their passports on them to prove citizenship and even then are fearful of being roughhoused and detained for no reason, the system is obviously broken. Or, maybe it's working exactly as intended.
Crime? I concede that if someone is illegal and they get stopped by law enforcement then I understand if they need to be deported. They are, after all, here illegally. The veteran from my previous comment should not have been deported after having served our nation honorably, but that is a one-off.
My point is that we have people at the top levels of government and corporation who have associated with a known sex trafficker. We have crimes literally right in front of our faces. Why are we spending resources on building a secret police of masked thugs who are basically doing whatever they want however they want, to deport people hanging outside of Home Depot?
Again, what problem are we trying to solve here? Are we just looking for people to deport, or are we trying to reduce crime? If we are looking for people to deport, then they should just say that instead of pretending like they are going after violent criminals and gangbangers, but then deporting gardeners.
If we are trying to reduce crime, there's some obvious places to start, and it isn't at the local Home Depot.
> Crime? I concede that if someone is illegal and they get stopped by law enforcement then I understand if they need to be deported. They are, after all, here illegally.
I am not sure I understand your position. If someone in the country illegally, then unless they commit a crime, or stopped by law enforcement, they should not be deported?
> The veteran from my previous comment should not have been deported after having served our nation honorably, but that is a one-off.
I’ve read the story in your link, and something is off. The person in question came to the country legally (not clear what it means in terms of his immigration status — maybe he came on a tourist visa, and then overstayed? Student visa -> overstay/fall out of status?) in 1975. At some point served in the army, which again was possible during some periods of time between 1975 and 2007 (perhaps even later), honorably discharged. Then, after some questionable things (not necessarily crimes, circa 2007) something went sideways, and lead to order of removal in 2014. The guy is old, and from a humanitarian perspective, IMO, he should not get deported. I still do not understand why he did not naturalize, but it is irrelevant at the moment.
> My point is that we have people at the top levels of government and corporation who have associated with a known sex trafficker. We have crimes literally right in front of our faces. Why are we spending resources on building a secret police of masked thugs who are basically doing whatever they want however they want, to deport people hanging outside of Home Depot?
> Again, what problem are we trying to solve here? Are we just looking for people to deport, or are we trying to reduce crime? If we are looking for people to deport, then they should just say that instead of pretending like they are going after violent criminals and gangbangers, but then deporting gardeners.
Why there should be a focus on only one? I mean, if you are doing an investigation into drug trafficking, make an arrest, and then discover that one of the arrestees is also committed another crime. Would you charge this person with the newly discovered crime, or not?
> If someone in the country illegally, then unless they commit a crime, or stopped by law enforcement, they should not be deported?
Sure, I can see why they should be deported. I don't think it's necessarily a good reason to be deported, but I concede that if you're illegal and get caught doing something you should not have done, then there's grounds for deportation. Like Al Capone got caught because he didn't do his taxes.
> from a humanitarian perspective, IMO, he should not get deported
That's interesting. Where do you draw the line?
> I mean, if you are doing an investigation into drug trafficking, make an arrest, and then discover that one of the arrestees is also committed another crime. Would you charge this person with the newly discovered crime, or not?
Sure, and there's tons of precedent for this (see Al Capone). But this isn't what's happening. ICE is not investigating crimes. There's purposely looking for people to deport, and employing filthy tactics to do this.
Again, if the tactics they're using causes US citizens to carry their own documentation, there's something seriously wrong.
> if you're illegal and get caught doing something you should not have done, then there's grounds for deportation.
So, the act of crossing the border without permission is fine?
> That's interesting. Where do you draw the line?
I draw the line in this particular case (and I have not spent time to learn more about his legal troubles, but assuming it was an honest mistake and he was careless w.r.t. hiring proper legal help to know implications on his immigration status) that this person served in the military and had a permanent residency that he lost due to a plea + his age, then yeah.
However, a random person crossing the border? No, they should be deported, and it does not matter if they are black, brown, or a tall Scandinavian blond.
> There's purposely looking for people to deport
Isn't it the whole purpose of the agency? Are there countries with functioning governments that have no ICE-like agency that is responsible to find and deport illegal immigrants?
> Again, if the tactics they're using causes US citizens to carry their own documentation, there's something seriously wrong.
I agree. That being said, I would think we have to examine how we got to this point, and I am not sure the answers and the conclusions would be good for both sides of the isle.
> So, the act of crossing the border without permission is fine?
Sure. If you're seeking asylum, why not go to the country that has a statue that says "send me your poor, huddled masses?"
> Isn't it the whole purpose of the agency? Are there countries with functioning governments that have no ICE-like agency that is responsible to find and deport illegal immigrants?
I can't answer that. But as a brown tourist to foreign nations I can say I've never ever been stopped and asked if I had my documents in those countries, except of course at the point of crossing (airport etc).
But as to the whole purpose of the agency? My question again is, what is the purpose of the agency? If the purpose is to just remove more illegals then I'd say it's not really doing a stellar job; Biden's administration did more deportations without resolving to scare tactics: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/trump-biden-immigrants...
But I pose to you this question — why not just add more resources to expedite the asylum process, rather than ruthlessly deporting and separating families and kids?
The first lady originally came to the US on a tourist visa before getting work as a model and eventually applying for a green card several years later. Musk came to the US on a student visa for a program that he never actually enrolled in. Even if you want to argue its "race-neutral", it's certainly not "proximity to the president neutral" so it still is very much "Gestapo-like behavior".
Some people have this weird view of history in which everything is judged by the end state. They believe we can’t compare a situation to something like Nazi Germany if it is not identical to the final stages of that fascist regime. The problem with that thinking is it ignores how these regimes got to that point.
Not only do they constantly escalate their atrocities growing worse over time, but many of those atrocities simply weren’t and won’t be known until the regime is deposed meaning the in the moment understandings of their evilness is incomplete.
It's not Gestapo-like, and whatever is your position on political spectrum it's ridiculous to put things like Stalin-Hitler-Mao-Pol Pot repressions on the same level as anything happening in the US.
>Trying to play "guess if the shadowy government agency is doing the right thing this week" is a losing game.
Which is why the best strategy is to bring things out of the shadows and have the government operate in the open whether that is more literal by making their actions part of the public record or just figuratively by requiring a lot of disparate parts of the government to coordinate on something like this so it can only go wrong with truly widespread corruption.
Playing a cat and mouse game with the government via technology is also a losing game. They'll always have more money, people, and expertise on their side. When the heart of the problem is the humans involved, the solution is inherently politics.
>There just can’t be a way to discriminate on the spectrum from “we use AI to tidy up the spelling and grammar” to “we just asked ChatGPT to write a story on x”
Why though? Did the AI play the role of an editor or did it play the role of a reporter seems like a clear distinction to me and likely anyone else familiar enough with how journalism works.
People know what it _should_ mean, but if you say that it’s fine to have an AI editor, then there will be a bunch of people saying something like “my reporting is that x is a story, and my editor, ChatGPT, just tidied that idea up into a full story”. There’s all sorts of hoops people can jump through like that. So you end up putting a banner on all AI, or only penalizing the honest people who follow the distinction that’s supposed to exist.
Fair enough, but my main response to that is that people need to support independent journalism. It's entirely possible I'm paying some fraud(s), but as someone who certainly spends more than the average person on online journalism, I trust the people I support at the very least know that putting their byline on an AI written article would be a career destroying scandal in the eyes of their current audience.
I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote. It being shutdown is more evidence of how broken the American political system is rather than an indication of the will of the people.
As a single issue, probably not. However, the meta-issue that they did vote for was eliminating anything the government pays for (other than military, ICE, or related to drilling oil)
The parent's point seems to be that since most voters of both corporate parties have pretty much universally internalized and accepted they're voting for the "lesser of two evils," it's safe to conclude our political system is captured and has been for decades. Furthermore, 1/3 of people refusing to vote is not solely out of laziness. Many of them have concluded the system is FUBAR.
We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.
The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is entirely how representative democracy works. You'll never see a representative who PERFECTLY represents your own views.
Which is why we have so many single issue voters on things like immigration, abortion, etc, who can safely ignore all evils as long as their single checkbox is checked.
Maybe in the philosophical sense in that this is what their vote wrought, but there is absolutely no way to conclude that people wanted their institutions dismantled. The number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump was nearly identical in 2020 and 2024 once we compensate for population growth (22.4% of the population vs 22.7%). Anyone making drastic conclusions on the will of the people is just making something up whether they are conscious of that or not.
What changed is the number of people who decided they were ok with dismantling institutions. That grew by about 7 million, who voted for the opponent in 2020 but stayed home in 2024.
So perhaps the number of people who wanted institutions dismantled remained the same. But the will of the people as a whole changed sharply, mostly because of people who decided it wasn't worth the effort to oppose it.
>What changed is the number of people who decided they were ok with dismantling institutions. That grew by about 7 million, who voted for the opponent in 2020 but stayed home in 2024.
How do you know this? How can you say the deciding factor was dismantling institutions rather than inflation, Palestine, misogyny against a female candidate, or any number of countless other good or bad reasons to have stayed home? You can't treat a single binary choice for red or blue like it was a referendum on every single individual issue.
Right, World Factbook single issue voters probably don't exist.
That aside, something that frustrates me about US politics is that I rarely see any evidence of consideration given to taxpayers who want value for their money as opposed to having their taxes cut.
I pay taxes here. I like it when those taxes spent on wildly ROI-positive initiatives like the World Factbook.
The Trump lot appear to be killing off a huge range of useful things that I like getting in exchange for the taxes I pay.
Sure, but this is based on a fundamental trust in governments ability to spend money effectively. The ineffective spending has been in the news way more than the effective spending, so some people take this to mean all of the spending is ineffective.
I don’t know how to square this skepticism of government against very vocal “patriotism” coming from the trump camp, but humans can contain multitudes, I guess?
It's a simple question of economics and observation.
In a free marketplace, when a product, service or company is no longer useful...it dies. This creates a natural incentive to constantly improve, operate more efficiently or expand into new areas where it can create value.
With government spending, this doesn't happen because there's no incentive for it to happen. Programs are created and then they grow, perpetually, forever.
My goodness, I still remember Bill Clinton proudly showing a balanced budget. I remember George Bush Jr running with one of his biggest campaign points around fixing Social Security.
How we got from that era of energy for fiscal responsibility to $39 trillion in debt is...maddening.
I think a tremendous amount of people want value for their money. It's one of the reasons so many people talk about cutting government spending where it's wasteful, operating with a balanced budget and reducing the trillions of dollars in debt that we've accrued...which will eventually devalue all of our money.
wouldnt it then be significantly better if you and others who want "value for their money" spend your own money making a world factbook, and then let people who dont much care not spend on it?
isnt this fair and equitable? you wouldnt pay for your neighbors lawnmower or cybertruck either?
This is all information the government will need to collate anyway. How much money do you think they'll save by not publishing it for others to use, exactly?
I think it's interesting to note that not only is there precedent for this type of "blocking technology that prevents the printing of certain things"[1], but it's also inconsequential and uncontroversial enough that most of the people here obviously have never even heard of it.
We lost the ability to print $50 bills with our HPs[2] and it had no noticeable negative impact on society. I'm not sure why losing the ability to print a gun with our Prusas will be any different.
Good news, as the article notes, the proposed regulation creates a working group to determine of it is feasible and won't require any further regulation if it is found nonfeasible. If you're right and this does prove to be "not technically possible", then nothing will actually change.
Hopefully this working group would do the right thing but the worldwide battle against end-to-end encryption is a pretty bad precedent. Experts who disagree with government surveillance demands seem to get discarded and replaced with yes-men. The California microstamping law isn't a good situation either.
Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban. It would be like if printer manufacturers weren't just asked to prevent the printing of US dollars, but anything that looks like money, having an ability to detect if something is money-like based on look and feel alone, without relying on an existing database or hardcoded watermarks.
Your implication makes me think that you assume that this useful-yet-not-overreaching detection tech is possible. Do you have any ideas for how this would be implemented? Because in my mind, the only way to ensure compliance would be either a manual check (uplink to the manufacturer or relevant government authority, where an employee or a model trained on known gun models tries to estimate the probability of a print being part of a gun) or a deterministic algorithm that makes blanket bans on anything remotely gun-like (pipe-like parts, parts where any mechanical action is similar to anything that could be in a gun). These scenarios seem to be both a lot more annoying and a lot more invasive. There's no negative consequences for tuning detection to always err on the side of caution and flood the user with false-positive refusals to print. Both scenarios are obviously a lot more involved and complicated than a basic algorithm checking if you're trying to print an image of a US dollar. Therefore I don't see a reason why drawing this comparison is useful. The only thing these implementations have in common is that they're detecting something.
>Other people have already pointed out the differences between implementing a check for a specific banned print and a vague categorical ban.
If you have seen that other people have pointed it out, you have already seen my response, but I guess people keep repeating the question, so I need to repeat the answer. This regulation establishes a working group to investigate this technology. If the technical aspects are as difficult as you claim, the proposed regulation will basically be voided. Your concerns are already factored into the proposal and therefore aren't a valid argument against the proposal.
That said, the regulation also makes it sound like "implementing a check for a specific banned print" would be an acceptable outcome of this law. From page 11 of the actual proposal:
>(b) be authorized to create and maintain a library of firearms blue-
print files and illegal firearm parts blueprint files, and maintain and
update the library, including by adding new files that enable the three-
dimensional printing of firearms or illegal firearm parts. In further-
ance of this authorization, the division may designate another govern-
ment agency or an academic or research institution in this state to
assist with the creation and maintenance of the file library. The
library shall be made available to three-dimensional printer manufactur-
ers, vendors with demonstrated expertise in software development, or
experts in computational design or public safety, for the development or
improvement of blocking technology and firearm blueprint detection algo-
rithms. The division shall establish safeguards to prevent unauthorized
access to and misuse of the library and shall prohibit all persons who
are granted access to the library from misusing, selling, disseminating,
or otherwise publishing its contents.
Think of it like the early stages of internet copyright protections, the first step is just cross-referencing the design with a list of known banned designs. Just like an early Youtuber could have mirrored banned videos to bypass copyright detection, people will likely still be able to manipulate designs in certain ways to get past this sort of ban. That's ok. Regulation like this doesn't have to be 100% effective to still be worth doing. The goal here is to make it more difficult for some random person with no expertise to buy a 3d printer, download some files, and print a weapon.
I'm willing to admit that it's entirely possible that a full on-demand analysis of whether a shape could potentially be part of a gun might not currently be possible and it might be years before that becomes feasible, but until then, simply banning a handful of the most popular STL files would still have value.
> Think of it like the early stages of internet copyright protections, the first step is just cross-referencing the design with a list of known banned designs. Just like an early Youtuber could have mirrored banned videos to bypass copyright detection, people will likely still be able to manipulate designs in certain ways to get past this sort of ban. That's ok. Regulation like this doesn't have to be 100% effective to still be worth doing. The goal here is to make it more difficult for some random person with no expertise to buy a 3d printer, download some files, and print a weapon.
Yes, I agree, and I understand that the law is narrow in this way. However, I still have worries that make the problem of matching STLs harder and less effective than the US dollar printing ban in ways that would force their hand to strengthen the legislation to make it not completely toothless. For one, STLs don't have consistent tells like money does - if you just match it by hash or something, even the most trivial modifications like an irrelevant metadata change or shifting the entire print to the side by 0.01 or something would be enough to thwart the detection. This would be far less effective than the money printer ban, and is so easy to execute that it would nearly nullify the value of this law, because it could be bypassed with a one-line instruction. Matching STLs by geometry within certain tolerances would be better, but still circumventable. This approach would give us the scenario you proposed, so I'm hoping it will go in this direction. However, now that the door to discussing 3D printing regulation is open, there's nothing stopping this law from being dialed up further, especially if they go with the first approach and find it completely ineffective.
I was bounced out of a Kinkos circa 2000 with my grandparents for attempt to counterfeit Pokémon cards on the photocopier. Mind you I didn’t seek to make illegal copies. I just wanted to photocopy and color in and draw on my own artistic creations. Fun times learning about copyright mechanisms and fraud as a kindergartner.
The problem is that images of $50 bills have enough alignment marks that the code to detect them could run on hardware from the ‘90s. From what I’ve seen, these bills naively assume that somehow the printer has to detect whether something is a gun or part of a gun. The fact that slicer software has to transform a mesh into gcode for a specific printer and specific settings means that a printer can’t just hash the file or something to check a blacklist. And how do you tell if something is part of a gun? A PVC pipe could be a gun barrel by that metric. Or maybe a trigger assembly is designed for a rubber band gun instead of an illegal firearm.
I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.
Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.
>Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed.
Here's a relevant article that addresses a lot of these points.[1]
Manufacturing firearms is not unlawful in the State of New York, nor is it unlawful federally.
As far as I can tell, there is no federal or state law that compels any company to add features like the ones HP has added to their products. I have not spent a large amount of time researching. Just browsed a few articles like this one https://www.itestcash.com/blogs/news/your-guide-to-federal-c....
I'll point out that I didn't mention the law in my first comment. I don't know the history of how this technology came to be so ubiquitous, so I didn't speak to it. However, from the perspective of a consumer, it doesn't really matter if it was due to regulation from the government or a collective decision of manufacturers to regulate themselves before the government intervened. The end result is still that the printer you buy from the local Best Buy will almost certainly block this. That is the precedent I was referencing and the collective loss that has gone unnoticed.
I also don't see the point about manufacturing firearms as particularly convincing. It was a process that used to be more difficult and technology has made that process substantially easier. It's reasonable for a government to think the old process didn't need regulation due to that complexity while the new technology intensifies the problem enough for a government response. New technology prompts new regulation all the time for exactly this reason.
This is legislation. Legislation that grants the government veto-power over what you can create. The entire issue here is law. The fact that you "...didn't mention the law..." in your first comment is stunning.
From the text of the proposed legislation, this blocking technology needs to fail closed. This means that you need a form of permission to start a manufacturing process. It compels each entity involved in the supply chain to add this government kill-switch from slicing software, firmware developers, 3D printer manufactures, etc.
The entire premiss for this? To stop individuals from manufacturing firearms and firearm components WHICH IS A LAWFUL ACTIVITY! Unbelievable that anyone would defend such government overreach.
Your motivations are transparent. You are using regurgitated anti-gun arguments. Arguments that have been thoroughly dismantled by SCOTUS. Many before you have used this logical fallacy that advancements in technology give the government a pass to interfere with individuals and their rights. Even very progressive judges have conceded that the first amendment is certainly not limited to quill and ink, but applies to the Internet. Additionally, the advent of strong cryptography does not give the government a reason to strip people of their 4th and 5th amendment protections.
>The entire premiss for this? To stop individuals from manufacturing firearms and firearm components WHICH IS A LAWFUL ACTIVITY!
Everything is a lawful activity until they make a law outlawing it. You're arguing against the idea of all new laws.
>Your motivations are transparent. You are using regurgitated anti-gun arguments.
I wasn't hiding anything. I think stricter gun regulations would be a net benefit for an American society that is way too obsessed with guns. The voters of New York generally agree with that idea. The last few months have also made it clear that all the years of 2nd Amendment advocates talking about us needing guns to fight tyranny have been lying about their motivations. So if we're demanding transparency, let's also be clear that there is no deeper ideology at play here beyond a love of guns.
Counterfeiting money is bad, and should be illegal (the wisdom of forcing such software into printers notwithstanding). Manufacturing your own products is good, and shouldn't be illegal.
Correct. And even if this bill passes you can build your own printer from common parts or drive across state lines to the nearest Micro Center. It’s useless posturing regulation for the sake of looking tough.
Uh, I'd say that something has in fact been lost in that every single printer sold watermarks every document printed regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.
There are plenty of people who change their behavior because that tracking is in place, regardless of if what they are doing (or would be doing) is in any way illegal.
Moreover, every person who has mostly printed in b/w on a colour device, but then been blocked by printing because the yellow cartridge has been emptied printing such watermarks is negatively affected by this.
>regardless of if you are attempting to print a $50 bill or not.
Maybe the way this applies to everything should be an indication that it's unrelated to the point I made about blocking the printing of certain things.
The ways that i've seen proposed for the 3d printer to determine if the thing you are printed is "gun related" was to force them to be internet connected, and to send your print files to some 3rd party (or government) server before you are allowed to print.
The proposed legislation is suggesting nothing of the sort. If a manufacturer wants to handle this by sending everything through their own server (something some manufacturers have tried absent any regulation), that is a choice that they're making and your complaint should be with them.
The printing of money has primarily lied within the purview of the government from the start. Money is one of the few modern physical item, off the top of my head, that this statement applies to. Maybe there are seals or other official marks that this also applies to, but all of these items fall into a similar category.
So while the legislation, and implementation can be deemed problematic, the political desire to prevent counterfeit is not actually unreasonable.
Having particular objects be banned that aren't under the exclusive control of a government actually creates new precedent. Regardless of the technical feasibility that you keep bringing up, this legislation is undesirable because of what could come after.
SolarCity and Tesla made more surface level sense just being in the same general vicinity since they're both fundamentally green energy companies. That made it easy to spin questions about the financials with some CEO-speak about synergy.
However, the way Musk has become less subtle with this tells a story. He got away with these shady financial dealings multiple times so he's now becoming even more brazen and transparent with this behavior. We have gotten to the point in which the spin needed to justify his moves is the physics-defying viability of datacenters in space.
The distortion field will keep growing as long as he keeps getting away with it.
I come to realize that spaceX is an ISP as well. And now with twitter, they are a social network too. Space launcher + internet network + social media + (next big thing). It would not be long until they start providing data centers (in space). And with the Elon distortion stock pricing, Wall Street will reward every business venture no matter how stupid he gets himself into. Like flame throwers. Or wine.
Tesla customers make great targets to sell Tesla solar. And Solar city customers make great targets of Tesla power banks. Though they should be selling old heavy Tesla batteries for stationary power storage.
Likely the intended meaning here is that the practicality of space data centers goes against the physical realities of operating in space. The single most prevalent issue with operating anything in space is heat dissipation in that the only method of doing so is via radiation of heat, which is very slow. Meanwhile, the latest Nvidia reference architectures convert such ungodly amounts of power into heat (and occasionally higher share prices) that they call for water cooling and extensive heat-exchange plant.
Even if one got the the economics of launching/connecting GPU racks into space into negligable territory and made great use of the abundent solar energy, the heat generated (and in space retained) by this equipment would prevent running it at 100% utilization as it does in terrestrial facilities.
In addition to each rack worth of equipment you'd need to achieve enough heat sink surface area to match the heat dissipation capabilities of water-cooled systems via radiation alone.
Not physics defying, just economically questionable.
The main benefits to being in space are making solar more reliable and no need to buy real estate or get permits.
Everything else is harder. Cooling is possible but heavy compared to solar, the lifetimes of the computer hardware will probably be lower in space, and will be unserviceable. The launch cost would have to be very low, and the mean time between failure high before I think it would make any economical sense.
It would take a heck of a lot of launches to get a terrestrial datacenter worth of compute, cooling and solar in orbit, and even if you ship redundant parts, it would be hard to get equivalent lifetimes without the ability to have service technicians doing maintenance.
Their viability is what I called physics-defying. Without some drastic changes to our current level of technology, the added costs of putting something in space along with the complexities of powering, cooling, and maintaining it once it's there is just too much to overcome the alternative of just building it on Earth.
Radiative cooling is the only option, and it basically sucks vs any option you could use on earth.
Second, ai chips have a fixed economic life beyond which you want to replace them with better chips because the cost of running them starts to outpaxe the profit they can generate. This is probably like 2-3 years but the math of doing this in space may be very different. But you can't upgrade space based data centers nearly as easily as a terrestrial data center.
One of the biggest but most pointless questions I have about our current moment in history is whether the people in power actually believe the stuff they say or are lying. Ultimately I don't think the answer really matters, their actions are their actions, but there is just so much that is said by people like Musk that strains credulity to the point that it indicates either they're total idiots or they think the rest of us are total idiots and I'm genuinely curious which of those is more true.
We’re at a point where propaganda is so much more powerful than reality that the people in power literally can’t tell the difference. When your source of ethics is the stock price, little details like physical impossibility stop seeming relevant.
You put it so succinctly and perfectly that I'll have to favorite your comment. Totally agree. The physical world has become little more than noise for people like Musk. I wonder whether the correction will be a slow market dip, a full collapse, or somehow whether he makes it out like a bandit. Baudrillard is, once again, uncomfortably accurate in his diagnosis.
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