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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I don't really understand. It may be an obvious econ 51 point, but it clearly needs to be stated when the current regime is talking about imposing price controls on food, opening state-run grocery stores because the private ones have been driven out of business, and all kinds of absurd (power-seeking) economic policies.

Musk fits an extremely profitable niche of being competent enough in different areas to coordinate investors with management with engineers.
Again, this may seem like a simple "business 101" thing, but you just have to look at his competitors like Boeing to see how neglecting it causes horrifically embarrassing failures again and again.
The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example. It's not that Boeing engineers are retarded, and it's not that they've been given an impossible task. It's not even that the Boeing CEO is a mad scientist imprisoning people in space to torture them with terrible movies: it's that basic management practices are being ignored.

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.
Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia somehow can see what needs to be done and do it, which is apparently a superpower in this world of Pump Six (and other stories)

The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example.

That one's been pretty fun to watch. I'm pretty anti-Elon, and follow some amount of anti-Elon accounts, and when that thing launched you could watch them going from "wooow, look at them making a rocket on their first attempt, without blowing anything up through 'iterative design'", to "so what it sprung a few leaks?", to getting awfully quiet as the magnitude of the disaster unfolded. Props to the people running the simulation, I couldn't write a better story.

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.