• xenomor@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    “The matrix.” Dude, you are a billionaire. You hang out with billionaires, and the most powerful public officials in the world. You are the matrix. Fuck off with this gaslighting fake-populist bullshit.

    When assholes like Musk and Friedman say garbage like this, they are advocating for taking away people’s power. People as collective wield power through government. They want to, instead, concentrate power in a small ruling elite class of oligarchs. It’s fundamentally un-democratic, and un-American.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      More specifically, he is a billionaire who once thought that AI could be extremely dangerous if developed improperly…

      … and has lately developed AI improperly, gotten into feuds with other people developing AI, is currently attempting to build an army of economy tier androids as well as literal fucking brain chips so that humans can be cyborgs some day soon.

      He would easily fit into the early timeline of The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix, you know, as one of the emblematic vain and greedy narcissists who set the downfall of mankind into motion.

        • Chozo@fedia.io
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          5 months ago

          He has zero self-awareness. When Elon found out that his then-girlfriend, Grimes, was going to voice a character in the game Cyberpunk 2077, Elon showed up at the developer’s studio, unannounced, requesting that they make a character for him to play the voice of, too.

          Nevermind the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about fighting corrupt billionaires and their mega-corporations large enough to employ their own private armies and instate their own governments, the leader of which wants to live forever by means of transferring his consciousness into a chip that can be implanted into a brain. Elon recognized absolutely none of the irony in the situation. Never once did he realize he was already in the game, except they named him Saburo Arasaka.

          Oh, he also brought a gun with him. He showed up unannounced, with a gun. I wish I was making this up.

          • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            It’s even weirder, because it was a flintlock - likely because you don’t have to actually register those in California, and Elon is paranoid about interacting with the government in a way that isn’t begging them for cash.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            So… when I played Cyberpunk 77 around a year ago on my PC, I did a whole bunch of edits to config files.

            I found some interesting stuff like hidden debug menus, hidden UI options menus, I tweaked a bunch of engine parameters to optimize view distance and object detail and lods, and I altered some root character model paths.

            I realize this will sound incredible, as I have no proof after my PC was stolen…

            But Elon’s face is in the game, same way Allahnah’s hair is, Keanu Reeves’s face is.

            Elon specifically only ever shows up as a possible face model for the cops, the NCPD.

            I have no idea if this is still in the game files, as its possible that I could only see it because I messed around with root character model file paths to get more variety from random male and female npcs.

            Funnier still: Elon’s face is always paired with a balding male hairstyle.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          If anything he would be one of the oligarchs from the MxO storyline but you have to actually be a pretty die hard Matrix fan to know anything about them, so yeah he’d think he’s Neo.

      • rayyy@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        vain and greedy narcissists who set the downfall of mankind into motion.

        You mean like those dedicated capitalists who are navigating Boeing into the ground?

      • takeda@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        More specifically, he is a billionaire who once thought that AI could be extremely dangerous if developed improperly…

        This was an attempt to use scale to make government regulate the market.

        Once AI is regulated only few companies control it.

        The real thing he and others are afraid of is the open source AI. If regular people are are in control of the technology then it no longer can be profited off.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Also, remember he believes in that “simulation theory” nonsense. And the reason tech bros like him believe in it is that it gives them the excuse to treat everyone else like shit. Because, you see, they’re NPCs. Unlike Elon. He’s got full awareness programming.

    • Clasm@ttrpg.network
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      5 months ago

      Not just taking away power, this will literally get people killed.

      Most of those regulations that are hurting his theoretical efficiency were written in blood.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    I’m still baffled by how ‘deregulation’ isn’t an extremely alarming word, not just in the current year or era, but overall.
    Not to mention that in the current context only rich people want deregulation & it’s clear why (to pollute more, hurt workers through wages and work conditions more, pay less taxes, and to be able to deal with competitors as they wish with monopoly being the actively pursued goal).

    The chances of over-regulation hurting the people are really small.

    Over- or under- regulation isn’t the same as good or bad regulation. You can have good and bad regulations both in the sense of standards and methodology, as well as in the sense of bad implementation.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Fuck consumers workers and the environment, more PROFITS baby!!

      For some reason Republicans can’t see that regulations tend to happen when companies fail to act responsibly in favor of profits.
      Deregulation of financial markets caused the financial crisis, because the markets exploited it for new “tricks”, that were irresponsible.
      Deregulation of consumer protections clearly harm consumers, and the same with environment.
      There are also standards regulations that stimulate competition, and greatly increase industry efficiency.

      • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        We have regulations because, spoiler, things used to be unregulated and they fucked up enough people demanded the government set some fucking rules.

        The regulations weren’t in the founding documents of the country. They came to be as the industries started exploiting and killing people.

      • Freefall@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Those morons hate regulations, but refuse to by foreign stuff because it “isn’t as safe and well made as American made”…you know, where we have tons of regulations…

        • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Not just that, they is an underlying racist bias to that. That Asian made products from overseas are cheap because they care less or have less pride in their work than American made. They think that we as Americans for some reason have a greater baseline pride that permeates through everything made here.

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yes, lets let companies deregulate. Boar’s Head is only killing a few people with listeria, imagine the hundreds they’d kill with fewer regulations.

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    This fucker would look at the DMV and fire 90% of the staff to improve efficiency. Also it’s now called DMX.

    • Blackout@kbin.run
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      5 months ago

      Brilliant 😊. And you know people would support it cause going to the DMV sucks until there isn’t one to go to anymore and you live the alternative.

    • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Quite a few places already don’t call it the DMV. It’s called the DDS here. Department of Driver Services.

  • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 months ago

    “We deregulated. The economy went down. The Matrix meddled, yet again!”

    You can’t win with these idiots. They could put their dick in a blender and still blame a feminist activist they’d never met.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’ve been saying for a while that the giant covid bailouts for businesses are exactly what will happen if trump is re-elected. He’s so afraid of not being able to say “best economy ever” he’ll drive up inflation to make failing megacorps slightly more profitable to shareholders insatiable greed.

    If you think house prices are unaffordable now, consider how much extra money rich people will throw around after another round of tax cuts for themselves.

  • nifty@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Conservative policies in any dimension of society are hostile to great swaths of the population affected by them.

    The only reason people support conservatives is because of culture war bullshit, which is used to brainwash them by constantly making them afraid of each other.

    No one sensible should be voting conservative under a late-stage capitalism scenario, which is where we are

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    When he says ‘the matrix’, he means ‘the interests of the average worker’.

    Remember, this is the same guy trying to sue to the National Labor Relations Board out of existence, because things like workplace safety and overtime pay and not having racist workplaces are inefficient.

    Also… fucking what, he talked with Trump about how to reduce the national debt?

    Ok 1, thats almost certainly just going to translate into auesterity, ie, dovetailing with Project 2025 to gut a whole bunch of government agencies…

    2… Trump has expanded the national debt more than any other President in history, and is so astoundingly economically incompetent he wants to remove all (?) taxes and replace this with a 20% across the board import tariff, which would basically detonate the economy.

    • Makeitstop@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Remember, this is the same guy trying to sue to the National Labor Relations Board out of existence, because things like workplace safety and overtime pay and not having racist workplaces are inefficient.

      This is a guy who was willing to compromise workplace safety simply because he doesn’t like high vis colors. Who fired an entire department that was in the middle of work that’s critical to the future of the company, simply because he was upset that their boss tried to argue that they shouldn’t gut the team arbitrarily.

      Efficiency I can understand, it’s a rational priority to pursue. Elon is a mentally unstable weirdo who either doesn’t care how much damage he does to the business, or is so disconnected from reality that he can’t really understand what he’s doing.

      He’s not just a typical corporate scumbag doing greedy things. He’s basically an aspiring Bioshock villain. If he was half as competing as he thinks he is, he’d be ruling a dystopian nightmare city on Mars by now.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    Sigh, an efficiency commission sounds like a way to to form a group of loyalists who has the power to arbitrarily decide on policy for any government agency based on a loose definition of “efficiency”.

    A group like that could simply decide that a private company is allways more efficient than a government agency, or that a deregulated market is more efficient than a regulated market.

    The goal of “efficiency” is increadibly vauge, while sounding positive.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        Getting rid of minimum wage can be good.

        I know it sounds weird, but if a country has a legal minimum wage it removes tools from unions since companies can just tell the unions to pound sand.

        Here in Sweden we don’t have any minimum wage mandated by the government.

        It is negotiated between the sector unions and employers.

        Also sympathy strikes are legal here.

        Whenever there have been talks about introducing a minimum wage in Sweden, unions have allways reacted negatively, as it would effectively prevent them from negotiating for higher wages, and a minimum wage would easily get stuck in the past.

        I know that the US and Sweden are very different, and that in the current labor market in the US, removing a minimum wage would be a disaster, but I felt as if your conclusion that minimum wage is allways bad needed a counterpoint.

        • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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          5 months ago

          unions have allways reacted negatively, as it would effectively prevent them from negotiating for higher wages,

          Maybe take away power from the union, but the union can totally still negotiate a minimum wage if it want. The union I’m part (insurance workers of the state of São Paulo) have a minimum wage, higher that the state and national one.

          • stoy@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            That is fair, I was absolutely projecting my Swedish biases in my earlier comment, sorry about that.

            • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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              5 months ago

              Sometimes a union will promote the union interest rather than member interest. There is a current scandal about corrupt unions here in Australia. We have a national minimum wages and also award wages by sector and seniority, like hundreds of minimum wages.

        • Serinus@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Unions here also don’t like universal healthcare here for the same reason.

          It’s not a good reason.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      No culture of their own, so they have to beat up leftists in dark alleys looking for loose artistic styles.

  • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    That these cretins are still clinging to their fucking Matrix / red pill metaphor like a decade after the Wachowskis came out as trans should tell you everything you need to know about how much internal sense any of their ideas make.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Because if there’s one thing Elon is really good at, it’s being efficient.

    Look how efficient he is at sitting around tweeting stupid shit all day.