25 minutes ago, Roadsternut said:

But you are probably also one. But does either statement really matter ?

You are also a prick.

19 hours ago, Yellowtail said:

Exactly. It's the same with Trump. The left loved him right up until he beat Hillary.

[Needs Citations]

You're the expert on The Left.

Should be easy for you to produce actual quotes from "The Left" talking about how much they loved Trump.

You're <deleted> nuts. 😭

15 hours ago, Patong2021 said:

What's your point?

Elon Musk a master of applying technology and the intellectual talents of others. He has created wealth, and offered innovations and advancement for society. We may not agree with his views and some may consider him unhinged, but there is no denying that his investment in Tesla promoted EVs, his investment in space advanced the world's knowledge of space, and his investment in satellite communications has allowed people in distant regions who were once isolated to connect with society. The 3 performers have not done any of this. All 3 are fine and decent people. However, none of them have made any contributions to the advancement of society. They have produced films and music that while entertaining, will be forgotten in 200 years. The advances that Musk has fostered are part of the advance of society.

Probably Happy Days will be forgotten, for sure. I doubt Hanks and McCartney will be though.

Society is advanced through Culture. Shakespeare was a mere writer and producer of sometimes tawdry entertainment, but he and his works are widely remembered in not only British society, but around the world. But we struggle to name the scientists of the same era. Music does endure. Plays and story telling do endure. Musk was not really an inventor, but ultimately whatever tech his minions come up with, eventually it will be obsolete, replaced by something better. Some of it might be enable humankind to take a next step, but a lot, because its mostly consumer rubbish, will be technological dead ends. The men who powered, with their money, the industrial revolution, are largely forgotten, sometimes remembers negatively, because there was a cost to the soul in their efforts, evidenced by the debate that has erupted in the last few weeks about events of about 200 years ago. We presume, through the lens of people who mostly won't live to the the 2050s, that Musk will be revered in the 2200's.

There are plenty examples of people, who in their lifetimes, were revered as visionaries, but in death, had a toxic legacy. One example is Cecil Rhodes, the so-called Napoleon of Africa; the Daily Mail called him a Man for All Time. Today, 120 years after his death, we wouldn't agree with that. In 80 years, he will be completely forgotten from popular discussion. James Wolfe, when he died at Quebec, became an almost mythological British hero. His death was transformed into an image of heroic self-sacrifice, and his reputation was deliberately cultivated through paintings, poetry and commemorative culture. Yet these days, who has a clue what he was about.

If we consider scientists and engineers. Lord Kelvin, aka William Thomson, was once lauded during his lifetime as Britain's greatest scientist, if not the World's. Nowadays, he;s not even in the top ten, largely because of his doubts about atoms and radioactivity. Other scientists and engineers like Oliver Lodge and Katharine Burr Blodgett were extremely well known in their lifetime, but are now completely forgotten. We remember Brunel, because his structures still stand. Tell me what George Westinghouse did without googling. You won't find a Tesla S in 200 years. You can forget about getting to Mars; people aren't going to Mars and living. And anyhow, like the Moon, hardly anyone on Earth will lie eyes on whatever structures are up there. 60 years on, 1 in 10 Americans think the Moon Landings were faked. We remember Von Braun because he was a Nazi who didn't swing from a rope. We know nothing really of the men and women who made it happen.

We have no more reason to assume that Musk represents the endpoint of technological history than Kelvin's contemporaries had to assume Kelvin represented the endpoint of physics. The person who ultimately transforms the technological landscape may be someone born decades after Musk's death — and history may consequently remember Musk not as the visionary who defined the future, but as one of the highly visible pioneers who belonged to the transitional period immediately before somebody else changed it. What might cook it for Musk is that he is hitching his cart to a political movement that is almost a personality cult (Trumpism will not survive his death). Then you think of a comparison with Charles Lindbergh; he is rightly remembered as the man who showed long distance flight was possible (heralding transatlantic air travel), but then he got into politics, and became closely associated with the Nazis. And here's the thing about Musk's politics; they ain't new, or original. He's basically aping his crazy Grandad's beliefs about Technocracy. Joshua Haldeman was not a nice bloke. He got himself into the Technocracy movement, which basically said get rid of elections, have experts in charge. Got thrown in prison for a bit, possibly for supporting the Nazis. After WW2, decided he liked the sound of the new South African Race Laws, and moved his family, including Musk's mum over there, along the way, in the 1940s, writing a few articles about Jews. Musk ain't his Grandad, but that ethos has rubbed off.

But after all that, people will still be humming away to Hey Jude, Yellow Submarine in 200 years. Te Deum is a hymn still in use 1600 years after it was first sung. Of course, you might say that's a bit bloody obscure. Greensleeves isn't though, and we have been humming that since the 1500s (though we might not know the words)

https://youtu.be/jS_nLcVG_tg?si=cm7pzMyz7drb-ihZ

Its harder to say the same about the moving picture; we just don't know. But most of us will still enjoy a film like The Godfather as much as audiences did in 1972. But you couldn't say the same about someone sitting down in 1975 to watch an early Chaplin silent movie. And moving back to music; you pick up on the legacy of Paul McCartney. 60 years after he was singing those songs, generations the same age as the generations he originally played to, are still enjoying the music, more or less in the same way as then. But who was still singing in 1970 "Keep the Home Fires Burning" "Any Old Iron"? "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" might last though.

Your statement contains a legitimate point about Musk's role in commercialising technologies, but it makes two very different errors: it overstates the uniqueness of his contribution and arbitrarily defines “advancement of society” to exclude cultural achievement. Tesla clearly helped accelerate EV adoption and competition, but the IEA's current analysis shows that the transition is being driven by a much broader ecosystem of manufacturers, government policy, battery development and consumer economics; by 2025, Chinese manufacturers accounted for more than half of global BEV sales and models, while Tesla's share of the US EV market had already fallen substantially as competitors entered. SpaceX has unquestionably contributed to lowering launch costs and building commercial spaceflight—the company has also become a significant NASA commercial partner—but that is different from saying Musk personally “advanced the world's knowledge of space”: much of the scientific knowledge comes from the engineers, scientists, astronauts and institutions conducting the missions, rather than from Musk himself. Likewise, Starlink's connectivity is a genuine technological achievement, but calling Musk's investment itself the social contribution overlooks the enormous collective work behind satellite communications.

Most importantly, your ludicrous assertion that McCartney and Hanks have made “no contributions to the advancement of society” rests on an extraordinarily narrow definition of advancement: McCartney's music has had a documented transformative effect on popular music, while Forrest Gump is preserved by the Library of Congress as culturally significant, illustrating that films can become part of a society's cultural record. Technological progress and cultural creation are not competing categories of human achievement: one changes what societies can do; the other can change what societies think, feel, remember and share. Finally, you claim that their work “will be forgotten in 200 years” is not an argument at all but a prediction about the future. History gives us abundant reason to be cautious about assuming that today's most celebrated technological figures will necessarily have the greater historical legacy.

4 hours ago, Roadsternut said:

No, that wealth is being transferred to PE in the Cayman Islands, to invest in soya farms in Brazil, to support Chinese demand for pork.

In NA and Europe, increasingly PE is buying up the care homes, where you hand over unfathomably large sums to sit out your days in a facility that would make a Blackpool B&B embarrassed. Care homes will cost you about £1500-2000 a week for the final 5-7 years of your life. If you need nursing care, expect £4000 a week or so will need to be found. At least one third of everyone on the forum will develop dementia. You're on the hook for £700,000. That's the house and savings gone. At least in the UK, if you are down to your last £22k, the state will step in so you are not a destitute gibbering idiot. Some of that will come from whatever state support you receive, whether you call that Social Security or State Pension or whatever. That money is, in effect, today's taxpayers money being transferred to account in George Town. Your own personal wealth is a combination of a lifetime of hardwork, perhaps working hard for a company that is creating wealth through making things people want, and, often later in life, receiving a legacy from parents who went before their time, because they were born in a different age. They croaked at 65-70, and everyone complained that the pension wasn't worth it. You though, get to live 85 years, but the last 5 years of those are spent pissing and <deleted>ting into your pants, calling the nurse mum, and not knowing what day it is. But you had 10 ok years, sweating on whether your pension will see you to 100, because everyone aged 50 think they are going to live to 100.

The PE firms are clever. They buy the nursing home as a going concern. They separate the business from the infrastructure, and then charge the business an unfeasibly high rent to use the facility (sale-and-leaseback / property-company structure). Jacking up the rent reduces the profitability of the care home business, reducing exposure to business taxes. Many of the PE firms are offshore, and in effect, the nation is being asset stripped.

So no, Gen X are less likely to benefit from inheritance. Later in life, many will find themselves raising kids again, but this time without support from the state, as their own children find child care costs rising beyond affordable, or the traditional stay at home mum model is basically untenable, if a couple have any home of buying a home of their own.

The so-called Boomers lived in a golden age. The Greatest Generation made all the sacrifice, struggled in the Great Depression, fought and died in WW2 to come back to ruins. The Boomers got to Twist and Shout and really did sod all to deserve it. I'd call them the Ingrate generation.

Now with the covid shots many will not live that long so gen X

will get the boomer money.

4 hours ago, Roadsternut said:

The Boomers got to Twist and Shout and really did sod all to deserve it. I'd call them the Ingrate generation.

I don't agree with that .

The boomers did some damage though.

Because of too much social benefits they did not want to do certain jobs

and invited guest laborers, aka the begining of the muslim invasion of western europe.

13 minutes ago, FlorC said:

Now with the covid shots many will not live that long so gen X

will get the boomer money.

I don't agree with that .

The boomers did some damage though.

Because of too much social benefits they did not want to do certain jobs

and invited guest laborers, aka the begining of the muslim invasion of western europe.

You are confused. Boomers did most all the jobs, and it was not the citizenry of the United States that opened the borders.

When I was a kid, at least half the kids I knew had a part-time job while still in high school, and everyone got jobs after graduating.

And I don't remember is raining money in air-conditioned office, I remember grunting it on a hot factory floor for $1.65 an hour.

10 hours ago, Patong2021 said:

And yet you joined on Saturday, weighing in on political topics. Why?

Read the rules......don't see any time limit.

Not sure what your problem is.

10 hours ago, Mr Awesome said:

Tom Hanks is a prick.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/tom-hanks-admits-behaving-badly-film-sets-1234732063/

....and Musk, the draft dodging illegal isn't?.......5555

I assume the OP is being facetious, but the times we are in are at least as weird as any end times religious tome.

There's a weird movement among Silicon Valley techogarchs called NRx. It is also known as the Dark Enlightenment.

It holds that democracy is an anachronism and that equality is not a worthwhile goal. The world should be run by a kind of Emperor, a techno authoritarian, who dictates how resources should be used and how society should be structured. By virtue of their wealth and technological or corporate innovations, a small elite should be fully in charge, with the masses under complete control, provided a basic income via a cryptocurrency regime, and provided entertainment that pacifies them and keeps them docile, akin to panem et circenses of Roman times. In a sense it's the Hunger Games, albeit with a much smaller elite.

Adherents of this movement include most of the tech titans, from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen and many others. They are of the view they are inherently superior to the other 8.5 billion humans, and know what's best for us, though they wouldn't mind if we all disappeared. The movement has largely coopted all the leaders of Silicon Valley, including Sam Altman, Marc Zuckerberg, even now-former Apple CEO Tim Cook.

One of their philosophical gurus is a guy named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin holds some rather controversial beliefs, such as that slavery is acceptable, Blacks are inherently inferior to whites, only the elite have any claim to power and authority. Yarvin believes the discipline brought by Hitler and Naziism was the right way to run a modern society. While not claiming to be a white supremacist, Yarvin has said he is favorably disposed toward that ideology.

Yarvin's supporters, besides other members of the Dark Enlightenment, include JD Vance and Steve Bannon.

The NRx movement, along with the technogarchs of Silicon Valley, use Trump as a patsy, believing he and his cult are the fastest way to rid the US, and the world, of democracy and let the elite do what they believe they are entitled to do. Both Trump and the MAGA cult are too stupid to see what the real goals of the technogarchs are. They know huge money impresses Trump as well as sycophantic, even unctuous, praise, so they have spent their time ingratiating themselves and will use Trump and Vance to reach their goals.

2 minutes ago, Wingate said:

I assume the OP is being facetious, but the times we are in are at least as weird as any end times religious tome.

There's a weird movement among Silicon Valley techogarchs called NRx. It is also known as the Dark Enlightenment.

It holds that democracy is an anachronism and that equality is not a worthwhile goal. The world should be run by a kind of Emperor, a techno authoritarian, who dictates how resources should be used and how society should be structured. By virtue of their wealth and technological or corporate innovations, a small elite should be fully in charge, with the masses under complete control, provided a basic income via a cryptocurrency regime, and provided entertainment that pacifies them and keeps them docile, akin to panem et circenses of Roman times. In a sense it's the Hunger Games, albeit with a much smaller elite.

Adherents of this movement include most of the tech titans, from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen and many others. They are of the view they are inherently superior to the other 8.5 billion humans, and know what's best for us, though they wouldn't mind if we all disappeared. The movement has largely coopted all the leaders of Silicon Valley, including Sam Altman, Marc Zuckerberg, even now-former Apple CEO Tim Cook.

One of their philosophical gurus is a guy named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin holds some rather controversial beliefs, such as that slavery is acceptable, Blacks are inherently inferior to whites, only the elite have any claim to power and authority. Yarvin believes the discipline brought by Hitler and Naziism was the right way to run a modern society. While not claiming to be a white supremacist, Yarvin has said he is favorably disposed toward that ideology.

Yarvin's supporters, besides other members of the Dark Enlightenment, include JD Vance and Steve Bannon.

The NRx movement, along with the technogarchs of Silicon Valley, use Trump as a patsy, believing he and his cult are the fastest way to rid the US, and the world, of democracy and let the elite do what they believe they are entitled to do. Both Trump and the MAGA cult are too stupid to see what the real goals of the technogarchs are. They know huge money impresses Trump as well as sycophantic, even unctuous, praise, so they have spent their time ingratiating themselves and will use Trump and Vance to reach their goals.

Anyone remember the film "Soylent Green" starred Charlton Heston?

I remember @Walker88 mentioning he had met with Musk and that he and @Danderman123 had invested early on and gotten rich.

Walker was absolutely gushing about what a great man Musk was, and how disappointed he was when Musk had a falling out with Trump.

I miss Walker and Dandeman both.

22 minutes ago, Yellowtail said:

I remember @Walker88 mentioning he had met with Musk and that he and @Danderman123 had invested early on and gotten rich.

Walker was absolutely gushing about what a great man Musk was, and how disappointed he was when Musk had a falling out with Trump.

I miss Walker and Dandeman both.

You "misremember", to use a Bush II-ism.

I suppose dementia will do that to an old guy like you.

44 minutes ago, Wingate said:

I assume the OP is being facetious, but the times we are in are at least as weird as any end times religious tome.

There's a weird movement among Silicon Valley techogarchs called NRx. It is also known as the Dark Enlightenment.

It holds that democracy is an anachronism and that equality is not a worthwhile goal. The world should be run by a kind of Emperor, a techno authoritarian, who dictates how resources should be used and how society should be structured. By virtue of their wealth and technological or corporate innovations, a small elite should be fully in charge, with the masses under complete control, provided a basic income via a cryptocurrency regime, and provided entertainment that pacifies them and keeps them docile, akin to panem et circenses of Roman times. In a sense it's the Hunger Games, albeit with a much smaller elite.

Adherents of this movement include most of the tech titans, from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen and many others. They are of the view they are inherently superior to the other 8.5 billion humans, and know what's best for us, though they wouldn't mind if we all disappeared. The movement has largely coopted all the leaders of Silicon Valley, including Sam Altman, Marc Zuckerberg, even now-former Apple CEO Tim Cook.

One of their philosophical gurus is a guy named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin holds some rather controversial beliefs, such as that slavery is acceptable, Blacks are inherently inferior to whites, only the elite have any claim to power and authority. Yarvin believes the discipline brought by Hitler and Naziism was the right way to run a modern society. While not claiming to be a white supremacist, Yarvin has said he is favorably disposed toward that ideology.

Yarvin's supporters, besides other members of the Dark Enlightenment, include JD Vance and Steve Bannon.

The NRx movement, along with the technogarchs of Silicon Valley, use Trump as a patsy, believing he and his cult are the fastest way to rid the US, and the world, of democracy and let the elite do what they believe they are entitled to do. Both Trump and the MAGA cult are too stupid to see what the real goals of the technogarchs are. They know huge money impresses Trump as well as sycophantic, even unctuous, praise, so they have spent their time ingratiating themselves and will use Trump and Vance to reach their goals.

Anyone interested in getting up to speed on the megalomania of the tech bros, here's a Wikipedia page that covers it pretty well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

17 minutes ago, Wingate said:

You "misremember", to use a Bush II-ism.

I suppose dementia will do that to an old guy like you.

No, I just saw Walker coming out of the White Rabbit with a dandy on his arm the other day,

12 hours ago, Mr Awesome said:

Tom Hanks is a prick.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/tom-hanks-admits-behaving-badly-film-sets-1234732063/

Well, you being a trump supporter clearly indicates your love for the above item, but, of course, it also means you're "tone deaf" when it comes to hypocrisy.

5 hours ago, FlorC said:

Now with the covid shots many will not live that long so gen X

will get the boomer money.

I don't agree with that .

The boomers did some damage though.

Because of too much social benefits they did not want to do certain jobs

and invited guest laborers, aka the begining of the muslim invasion of western europe.

Predictable fruitcake-meets racist response from you. I expect nothing less from you.

I thought you Anti-Vax Loons were predicting Gen X were all going going to drop dead by 60 with exploded hearts and the like?

Gen X average age is 53. Many are already OAPs. What are you, a freaking millennial whipper snapper?

Yes, I know "muslims" aren't a race.

12 hours ago, WIAA Alfie said:

Read the rules......don't see any time limit.

Not sure what your problem is.

You appear under various names intent on pushing your political agenda, hectoring and harassing.