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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Board chair Robyn Denholm wrote in a letter included in the regulatory filing: “Elon has not been paid for any of his work for Tesla for the past six years… That strikes us, and the many stockholders from whom we already have heard, as fundamentally unfair.”

    Musk’s compensation for 2023 was $0, the filing showed, as the billionaire does not take a salary from the company and is compensated through stock options.

    it’s so unfair that elon hasnt gotten a single pay check and has instead had to settle for making billions off of his stock options. think of all the mega yachts and social media companies he could’ve bought if only he had been paid a salary.





  • i dont really see how this answers my question. it seems like you said “i’m not arguing against government action” and then proceeded to argue against government action.

    and aside from that, it seems like what you’re advocating for is this brutal world where companies are always trying to test you to see how much you’ll put up with. and in this world, every single purchase you make should be interpreted as saying “i can take a little more exploitation before i reach my breaking point”. is this really a world you want to live in? how is that better than asking the government to keep companies in line?



  • I’m more than willing to vote with my wallet.

    voting with your wallet isn’t really voting though. how are companies supposed to tell the difference between you not buying something because you’re not interested, and you not buying something because of some principled opposition? the other huge problem with the “vote with your wallet idea” is that bigger wallets get more votes. and people with bigger wallets might not care as much about incremental price increases.

    Your analogy of uprooting your life to live in another country is a bit of an over exaggeration, we’re talking about missing out on a gig, it’s not akin to starting your life over.

    are you familiar with the purpose of an analogy? here’s the merriam webster: definition of an analogy:

    a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect

    is starting your life over different from not going to a concert? yes, but that’s not the point of the analogy. you can say a bunch of “true” if-then statements, but that doesn’t really accomplish anything if the premises are never satisfied. so that’s why i gave an analogy with a premise that’s even harder to satisfy, to illustrate this very point.


  • “the price will go down if no one buys the tickets” is true in the same way that the statement “if everyone moves to finland, then no one will live in germany” is true. it doesn’t really mean anything, because you can’t convince everyone to stop buying tickets in the same way that you can’t convince everyone to move to finland.

    this sort of problem is why governments regulate things. during the industrial revolution, companies would’ve stopped using child labor if everyone refused to buy from companies that used child labor. but that didn’t happen, so governments took it upon themselves to make child labor illegal.




  • Everybody knows what free speech means.

    i really dont think so.

    free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know “it only applies to what the government can do to you”, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.

    and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)




  • i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.

    here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:

    Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.

    you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)

    even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”