Yet he’s taking DoD money for Starlink in Ukraine. At what point do his antics turn from the craziness of a billionaire to espionage and being deemed a Russian asset?
Nationalizing the satellites that we paid for as a national security asset sure seems reasonable here, seeing as he likely broke a contract when he disabled them.
Imagine if Lockheed disabled an allied F16’s targeting computer during a mission; there would be hell to pay.
Musk openly stated that he spoke directly with Putin after the Ukraine invasion had started. The super wealthy have no loyalties and will sell anyone and anything to the highest bidder. I’ve said it before, every penny after $1 billion needs to be taxed at 100%. Time to reign in the oligarchs.
Suggestions have tried and failed numerous times. An easy example is closing loopholes in taxes. Another is reforming estate taxes and capital gains taxes.
The problem is we have solutions already they’re not being done. Get off lemmy. Find representatives that fit your worldview and vote vote vote.
The alternative which I feel is more likely is continue the slide to fascism everywhere until it reaches a head then on comes the bloodshed.
We really need to do better teaching history in school because Jesus Christ online forums are full of people trying to reinvent the wheel and detached from the real world.
Your reasoning here is irrational, and frequently repeated by many.
“They will find another way, why even try! Gosh!”
Okay, then we’ll block that way, and the next, and the next, and the next.
This is iterative development and is how the whole world works. I cannot grasp why so many people have this defeatist attitude toward resolving problems.
Because people are lazy and want a singular solution every time and if they don’t get it most quit.
Laziness is honestly our largest inspirational force and it should be celebrated to let us do more interesting and fulfilling work but instead instant gratification has ruined us and made people lazy and shitty.
Yeah any system that involves humans will require maintenance and adjustments by humans. Because humans always find a way to fuck things up. There’s this weird compulsion to demand a system that can’t be fucked up by humans. But it’s not possible. Also it’s not necessary… if a system involves humans it means there’s humans around to do the necessary maintenance and adjustments to that system.
We really need to rethink how ownership itself works. All assets should be in a public registry, and no country’s laws should recognize any claim of ownership not backed by the registry. For the sake of privacy, I’d make an exception for up to like $1 million in personal assets owned by an individual, but never for business assets and never for ownership of a company or shares of a company.
Comments like these are not only unhelpful, they hurt progress moving forward. Do you also apply this logic to domestic abusers (wouldn’t wife beaters just beat places you can’t see or use sexual assault? ), or speeders (won’t people just speed when no law enforcement are around?), or regular joe tax evaders? I’m going to assume not. It would be absurd to just thow up our hands and say “you know what? We’re never going to stop pedophilia, so lets put no laws or regulations in place to punish pedophiles.”
I’m not going to claim that the original commenter’s solution is perfect or even very effective, but if we do nothing (and comments like yours are encouraging doing nothing) then the percieved problem will gwt worse. We reward the bad behavior and the bad behavior continues and gets worse. Something needs to be done whether it’s perfect or not. If you’ve ever created anything, especially something to be used or enjoyed by others, you know your first draft of it is shit. There are so many things that you couldn’t see until you put the work into it or release it to others and that’s okay. You learn, you revise, you plug the holes, you scrap and implement something new, you continue the process. The “rule of thumb” didn’t stop abuse, but it was a step. We still haven’t stopped abuse, but a lot of us keep plugging along, trying to stop it in our own ways (at individual, local, national, and international levels).
If you do care about this and want to contribute, but don’t like the presented solution, offer up your own or maybe point to resources of those advancing a cause from a different angle. If you’re here to shit on ideas because you don’t care or are trolling and want to actively hinder discussion, you can fuck right off. If you are trolling I’m okay with the offchance the overall message is recieved by someone else who needs it.
I provide no solutions that haven’t already been tried and continue to be tried. Have you tried actions outside of lemmy like actually voting and promoting people who want to fix this? I love that a glib comment on lemmy has drawn a novel of a response when everything we say here means jack shit. I’m in the real world doing what I can to change it for the better.
Wealth taxes are fantastic in theory, but in practice have never worked. They’re too hard to implement. I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but I just don’t think a wealth tax is the answer.
I mean, the truth is that we’ve never found a way to prevent some people from hoarding huge amounts of wealth. Probably not a great sign for the future of our species.
There’s more good people than bad people. The only way the bad people win is by convincing the good people to give up.
Yes shitty people will always be fucking up things for everyone else. But that doesn’t mean working to stop that is pointless. It’s more the opposite, it means we have to be continually working to stop the assholes from fucking things up for everyone.
It’s a seriously hard problem. The IRS already can’t keep up. In order to implement a wealth tax they would not only have to do what they do now, but also assess the value of every estate of every wealthy person. They would need experts in all sorts of things to even attempt to pull that off. Experts in fashion, jewelry, cars, planes, boats, art, etc… as soon as you let even one of those things slip through, that’s what becomes the new wealth sync. Previously it’s been attempted by they excluded art because that’s notoriously hard to assess the value of. So the wealthy bought and traded a bunch of art to hide their wealth.
I got down voted for my previous comment, but it’s the truth. The concept is simple and if it worked I would be all on board. It’s the process for implementing it that is the hard part and has historically always caused a wealth tax to fail. It’s not a new concept, but there is a reason it isn’t used. I’m not saying we should do nothing, but that we should do something different. We could start with adding back some income tax brackets.
Maybe but we were doing better at it before Reagan came along.
But it isn’t a silver bullet. If we want to deal with the root of today’s problems we need to focus on a number of solutions around anti-trust, pro-labor, wealth tax, lobbying, campaign finance, etc.
You can definitely tax the hell out of dividends and sales. They are free to hold as many imaginary value tokens as they like, but the second they try to convert those tokens into actual currency, that should be heavily taxed. This goes for stock as well as cryptocurrency/NFTs.
There are lots of ways to sell assets in specific scenarios to reduce tax burden or eliminate the tax rate to 0%. For example, a billionaire can take a loan and pay the interest only for years. Then in a year with losses on investments then can sell some assets to pay off the loan and pay no taxes.
Except if the money they are using to pay the interest and the money received from the sale of those assets is taxed appropriately. Interest on business loans should not be deductible, nor should investment losses. The government is not responsible for their poor business decisions. Of course, there can be delineations for investment loss write-offs based on total gross income from all sources. A small business owner or an individual that holds an investment account with an AGI under $1million or so would reasonably still have access to such write-offs or deductions, but anything over that $1million per year is free game, losses or not.
Honestly I don’t know. It’s really more the sentiment that I’m expressing. I’m aware that the wealthy are very good at playing shell games. No measures would catch everything.
He’s my fun little conspiracy theory. If I could send the CIA to do my bidding, I would have punished him by manipulating him into buying twitter. You can’t nationalize SpaceX because it would signal the failure of privatized space exploration, but you can’t have that idiot out there as a walking national security disaster looking for a place to happen. The only option if he can’t be controlled is to get him out of the way until he retires or another private competitor can become the favorite. Twitter cost him a ton of money and his reputation, exposed him as a fool, and keeps him busy with unimportant bullshit. Everyone just shrugs it off as Elon being Elon. It’s really perfect.
The spin at the end is just fluffy bullshit. Starlink, from the get go, has had bandwidth reserved for military operations albeit US military operation but military operations nonetheless. The real question here is how and why did he know that operation was happening and what other operations has he known about/thwarted/or knowingly or unknowingly passed along information about.
Maybe the same FSB agents that were driving his paranoia. Assuming they knew about the attack, they could get a bigger win by stopping it and removing Starlink from the equation at the same time, than by stopping the attack with military means.
Definitely. He used terms such as “Lenin’s mistake” when talking about Ukraine which is rather specific to Russian nationalist ideology. You don’t stumble across such a thing by accident.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter that he owns. Sevastopol is a port city in Crimea. “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
“How am I in this war?” Musk asks Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
Musk, transparent as ever, makes sure to tell his biographer that it's about peace, man, and has nothing to do with his love of authoritarian regimes.
Didn’t his company supply a bunch of Starlinks because of the war? Was he expecting Ukranians needed to watch more Netflix and do more school stuff while getting bombed out by the Ruzzians? What a crock
Yeah, that was when he expected Russia to win easily. Probably figured he’d get a little bit of good PR, then Russia wins and then he could say “I tried to help, but I guess it just didn’t work out for Ukraine.” Just didn’t go the way he expected I guess.
That and I don’t think he was quite so far down the fascist rabbit hole back then.
Maybe if he had any actual knowledge instead of just buying shit and slapping his name on it, he would know that the Internet was originally DARPAnet and was designed for expressly military purposes prior to being co-opted by capitalists.
Once the killers have done all the killing they want, peace becomes paramount. Once they’ve stolen everything they can steal, then theft becomes a crime. A man with a gun kicks in your door, starts eating the food from your fridge and fucks your wife. He’s doing good peaceful things and if you resist you’re a warmonger.
If you own a new Tesla purchased since he took over Twitter, I suspect you may start having some increased tire and paint bills. I could see it becoming a trend; feels like the kind of thing kids could get into.
Fuck that. We don’t need some Tesla version of that Kia challenge shit. I happen to drive a Tesla that I bought when Elon was still cool. I would never buy another thing from him (for a variety of reasons, many of them related to the car), but I’m still stuck with what I have because it’s a bad financial decision for me to change the car now. He already has my money and it pisses me off every day. The last thing I need is some anarchist, vigilante twat slashing my tires to “teach me a lesson”. Go fuck up Elon’s shit instead of taking it out on people who just might feel the same way about him as you do.
maybe if starlink was being sold to russians lmao.
starlink said they are not interested in being used for war, you expect a bunch of civilians behind it to be responsible for human death?? do you even fucking consider what that implies lol?
this is them making a statement that says “look, you’re killing people who deserve it but we’re not willing to be reliable either way for if you die bc we fuck up or if you kill other humans thanks to this tech”
could you imagine the media SHITSTORM if they agreed? “WARMONGER MUSK working responsible for innumerable deaths”
I mean, it’s his company, nothing secret about it.
Other than that - a loitering munition requiring internet connectivity on approach to target sounds awfully stupid.
And, of course, he provided that connectivity by his own initiative with his own idea as to how it should be used in the first place.
Being given a certain kind of gift many times doesn’t mean you become entitled to it.
Musk considers Russian presence in most of Ukraine aggression he wants to help foil, but a significant Ukrainian counteroffensive something he doesn’t want to help. If you accept his choice in the former, you should accept it in the latter.
Or maybe not steal fucking billions of funding intended exactly for that counteroffensive to not rely on one billionaire’s ideas of cool. Maybe Ukraine should do something about that pervasive corruption first, then blame Musk. With that amount of funding they should have been able to simply overwhelm Russia FFS.
With the comms down, the Ukrainian submarine drones packed with explosives “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes, according to CNN.
Wait, does this means the military drone is equipped with starlink antenna? In that case, I think it make sense for a company to not want their product to be used in a military weapon. IIRC many tech companies and even open source projects have extra clauses in their license to forbid use in military weapon. Musk should have warn Ukraine first before they launch it in the field though.
He didn’t think giving it to Ukraine (I say give but he basically got the US military to pay for it) to defend against a Russian invasion would mean it would be used by the military??
Defending is one thing, but putting it on a weapon platform is another thing. A few years ago there were a lot of discussion when one of the popular open source library (I forgot which) explicitly said they won’t allow their work to be included in any weapon system that used to kill human. A lot of people in tech were in agreement, so it’s not a stretch to imagine western tech companies typically don’t want their product to be weaponized.
Ehh, musk is a marketer who happens to own tech companies. He’s doing this either to help the brand (collect military dollars while publicly being anti-war) or to leverage more contracts (US military didn’t explicitly contract for this use, please pay me more next time).
It was an invasion, they were attacking Russia on Ukrainian soil, everything they are doing is defensive. He timed it being unavailable during a major planned offensive, he was working for the other side, you cannot defend this.
As an oligarch, he stands with the other Russian oligarch who need and benefit from this war. If the rouble is at an historical low, the ones who have money in other currencies have an historical purchasing power in Russia…
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