Google Glass looked dorky, Meta Ray-Bans look cool.

There’s no possibility or need for morality to be universal, and societies have improved their ethics many times throughout history. Your take is nihilistic and presupposes that moral progress isn’t possible, even though we’ve seen objective moral progress many times.

Morals / ethics change of course. However that is not objective progress, only subjuctive. You think it is objective because you agree with the new system. Slave owners of the past would call it a regression that they can't live their lifestyle. Of course I agree with the new standards (at least here) and so am glad they can't.

edit: yes, nillistic - but sometimes you have to go there

Just because it’s subjective doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. The slave holders were wrong, you and I are right. Less human sacrifice in the world is a good thing, and we shouldn’t require a perfect ethical framework before we act ethically, because some real things aren’t reducible to objective logic or perfectly consistent ontologies.

Hunter Thompson?

Not saying he wouldn't have banged on the button, for all he was worth, but no one in their right (or even severely sick) mind would ever let him near it.

Looks like he's referring to Harry S. Truman.

Probably doesn't know who Thompson was.

I'll never forget Thompson speaking at my school as the war in Vietnam was drawing to a close.

He did not mince words.

For the benefit of any others unfamiliar:

Thompson: The man who invented gonzo journalism, writing beginning in the 1950s for numerous publications but most notably Rolling Stone, best known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, serialised in RS, published as a book, and the basis of two films, Where the Buffalo Roam (loose adaptation, 1980) and more faithfully in 1998 under the original name, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.

Hedge funds make profits in a lot of ways that don’t lead to more liquid markets.

It isn’t all or nothing. The Cuban Missile Crisis should have led to war, but we stopped it. World War I never should have happened. The right answer is to acknowledge envy, greed, and laziness but find solutions to work around these problems.

And also a lot of toxic technology that shouldn’t exist. I agree with parent that many brilliant minds are wasted on zero sum practices at these hedge funds, because the potential profits are so high. It’s a useful social question to ask how we can incentivize the smartest people to work on the most important problems, since naturally there’s little profit in curing obscure diseases.

My business ethics professor just showed clips from Yes, Minister! and House of Cards in class and showed the tactics. Seemed odd at the time, but I got more out of it than a normal ethics class.

>People loyal to their country tend to stay there.

You'd be surprised. If I were to emigrate because of economic reasons (which is by far the most popular reason to emigrate) my loyalty would stay with my paychecks. I don’t see how it could be otherwise. What binds me to my new country? My history, my character, my race, my religion…? Guess not.

Many modern immigrants to America are purely economic. The rich are fine with this because they profit, but the labor class suffers.

> People loyal to their country tend to stay there.

Not necessarily true. Source: I have friends and family who came to the US from Russia and are still loyal to Russia. When the topic comes up, they tell me they would fight for Russia in a hypothetical US/Russia war.

It's entirely possible to love your country and still seek out a better life elsewhere for practical reasons.

Edit: To clarify, this isn't universal. Some folks who came over absolutely hate the country of their birth, some still love it, while others are ambivalent. But you can't make a blanket statement like "people loyal to their country tend to stay there" when there are stark financial and quality of life advantages to moving from one place to another.

Some immigrants are loyal to their country.

A company hires immigrants.

It's possible the company has hired immigrants loyal to their country.

Logically, it works like that.

We’re at a point where propaganda is so much more powerful than reality that the people in power literally can’t tell the difference. When your source of ethics is the stock price, little details like physical impossibility stop seeming relevant.

You put it so succinctly and perfectly that I'll have to favorite your comment. Totally agree. The physical world has become little more than noise for people like Musk. I wonder whether the correction will be a slow market dip, a full collapse, or somehow whether he makes it out like a bandit. Baudrillard is, once again, uncomfortably accurate in his diagnosis.

Elon Musk is a genius, but he’s a financing genius. Look at the long history he has of false promises supporting financing deals between his companies and you’ll see this for what it is, a cash injection and a lie to justify it. He did the same thing with a fake solar roof demo when Tesla bought the almost bankrupt Solar City. He also shifted resources from Tesla and SpaceX to support X in the early days. Even founding xAI outside of Tesla, when so much of its valuation was built on its AI capabilities, was questionable.