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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101

Elon has 200 000 000 followers. How many of them didn't take econ 101? And this is especially in the context of chasing price gouging where it doesn't exist promised from presidential candidate (also she is literally vice president now - why is she not bringing prices down now if she knows how). Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat and the government rations of gasoline (on which secondary market was allowed - so it put some income in the families that didn't drive) are the two programs that I think yielded good results.

Government bringing the price down of good in demand is one of the bad ideas. Its problem is that it is unobvious bad idea for a lot of people. Even though wherever it has been tried - from NYC rents trough soviet car industry all the way to Zimbabwe supermarkets it has failed miserably. So probably a good chunk of Elon's audience actually doesn't know it is a bad idea. There is nothing wrong in people from time to time to explain the basics again.

His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities.

I have been in tech also all my life. I never felt good deep in the theory, but I always exceled at jury rigging very innovative solutions out of existing stuff. I think that Elon has similar talent - he knows the stuff that his companies do well enough and the tech there, but his real talent is to have instinctive knack where the limits are and to push the people that really dig deep to them.

I don't understand aerospace much - but the fact that we react to falcon boosters landing the same way Lila from futurama reacted to going to the moon - says quite a lot that the guy knows how to assemble amazing engineering teams and is enough of an engineer to be able to work with them and steer them.

Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat ... yielded good results.

This program is destroying supply.

Yes. There was overproduction of grain at the time and the prices were collapsing. So the government needed to bump them up a bit IIRC

There was general deflation at the time. The program was nonsensical, as was usual for a lot of New Deal programs.

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