> The main think I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children.

You missed a word there.

`The main NEGATIVE things I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children.`

> Compared to making EVs mainstream,

He didn't do that, although he contributed. I can credit him with raising the consumer demand for in-vehicle assistance.

> helping paralyzed people interact with the world,

I also helped someone carry their groceries yesterday. That's a personality trait. The results of one of his many business efforts is not a personal act...although he likes to take credit.

> reducing traffic in LV,

That was a selling point for funding a different boring technology (that wasn't realized) and hopefully a better transportation system (which also wasn't realized) for a convenience tunnel. SR-99 is a commuter highway tunnel, with double the traffic, and the Seattle Tunnel Partners is not considered a magnate for the same reason Elon's tunnel isn't. It's just boring (literally and figuratively).

> cutting government fraud

That's not what happened.

You should expand your bubble.

OK. I wouldn't call this rude, much less "incredibly rude," perhaps the word I'd use is "blunt." But whatever. I continue to wish there was a "block this user" feature on this site.

Some people just want to frame every statement as an argument, which is not a compelling approach to a discussion. This understanding cannot be accepted by many people, because they are always considered more informed or competent by their peers. It's rarely worth engaging in replies to people on forums for this reason. It's especially true of randoms who demand their own personal standards of respect.

> It's especially true of randoms who demand their own personal standards of respect.

Avoiding strawmen and nitpicks, and the need to provide supporting arguments in a discussion are fairly widely recognised.

It seems odd you would think that they are unique to the person that is disagreeing with you.

If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude. Straw man arguments are incredibly disrespectful, and most people would do better if they had participated in a high school debating class.

Hacker news indeed needs a block button.

> If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude.

100% disagree, and that’s not what happened here anyway.

> Straw man arguments are incredibly disrespectful, and most people would do better if they had participated in a high school debating class.

HN is not a formal debate, and even if it were, I’m not sure that what the other poster said is a strawman. My unsolicited advice would be to dial back your expectations of the level of discourse you’ll get from others on this site (I had to do the same, a while back!)

It’s a technical site. It’s reasonable for technical discussions to have professionalism and adult behaviour. Judging by moderation on angoragoats comment it seems that others feel the same way.

> It’s reasonable for technical discussions to have professionalism and adult behaviour.

I agree. My point is that I believe the comment you got upset about was in fact not as rude or childish as you’re making it out to be, and perhaps looking at it through that lens would mean you’d come off as less reactionary in the future. Have a good day.

Your comment never provided any supporting arguments so you’re unlikely to convince me or anyone else to expect less from HN.

Your account is also new, so I (and it seems others) don’t think you should be giving advice about how to interact on HN.

Thank you, I will.

What if I told you I’ve been on HN since approximately when your account was created? Would that change your opinions at all? (Hint: ideally it shouldn’t, because basing your opinion on the age of my account when you have no other information about me is sloppy argumentation.)

And FWIW, your comments are full of unsupported accusations of logical fallacies and unsupported assertions like “If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude,” so I was replying in kind.

> Would that change your opinions at all?

It wouldn't, I'd be saddened that you don't know how to to have a civil discussion with others on a technical site after two decades, but I'd still feel that you should know that.

> unsupported accusations of logical fallacies

There's no point in writing something that can be be disproven by scrolling up the thread. Where I accused the other person of a logical fallacy, I wrote:

"pointing out that other people also share credit for Elon's innovations - my comment never made stated that Elon deserves exclusive credit for this, this is a straw man

You're welcome to acknowledge the error.

> unsupported assertions like “If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude,”

All positions are expected to have supporting arguments in a debate with peers. 'No' does not include supporting arguments. You should have learnt this from high school debating, civics etc. as a teenager, of failing that, adult discussion in your workplace, or failing that, participating in technical discussions on sites like HN.

> It wouldn't, I'd be saddened that you don't know how to to have a civil discussion with others on a technical site after two decades, but I'd still feel that you should know that.

Are you saying that I've been uncivil in my discussions with you? If so, please do not falsely accuse me of something I didn't do. I've been civil this entire time (and just in case you missed it, I am not @Supermancho, the user who originally replied to your comment). Note that civil/uncivil and blunt/sensitive are two different axes. My posts may have been blunt but they have been civil.

I am loathe to accuse others of logical fallacies, especially since, as I stated previously, this is not a formal debate, but "Your account is also new, so I (and it seems others) don’t think you should be giving advice about how to interact on HN" is the most textbook ad hominem fallacy I've read on the internet in some time.

If you read news outside of what you personally agreed with, you would know that Musk is a lot worse than just "supporting a candidate people like". That's the thing that got all the low-information California liberals who weren't paying attention to stand up and listen, but Musk has been a problem for a lot longer. My personal moment of disillusionment was when a bunch of kids got trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018, Musk suggested a rescue sub that wouldn't work, and Musk's answer to the rescue diver pointing this out was to call him a pedophile. And even then, I'm kind of a johnny-come-lately.

But even if you don't care about Musk's personal attitude, and just like his results... his results absolutely, positively suck. I'll go point by point, as all of them are overstated and fall apart when you look at the details:

- Making EVs mainstream: He bought the founder seat of an EV company (and sued the actual founders over who's allowed to use the word "founder"). The one car that was a clean-sheet Musk design, the Cybertruck, was a huge flop you can't even take into a car wash without remembering to put into "Car Wash mode". Also, Tesla as a company engages in comically owner-hostile parts pairing, their cars have some of the worst fit-and-finish issues I've ever seen, they feel a constant need to reinvent how cars work to make them seem "futuristic", and the only thing stopping BYD from handing them their ass on a silver platter is the fact that the US government engages in shittons of domestic car company protectionism.

- Helping paralyzed people interact with the world: In clinical trials on a handful of human subjects, many of which already have had complications due to the BCI device failing. I admit I don't know enough about medical devices to know where Musk hid the bullshit here, but I do know other companies are doing similar things already.

- Reducing traffic in LV: I genuinely do not understand how you could come to this conclusion about the Vegas Loop unless you have never stepped foot in Vegas. The Loop is a god damned joke of a service. The tunnels only exist between one convention center and about two integrated resort hotels; everywhere else the Loop is just a glorified taxi service with an app that barely works.

What he should have built was an actual underground train line, but all these techbros that want to solve traffic don't want to touch trains with a 100 foot pole, because that costs real money and Musk just wanted to aurafarm.

- Cutting government fraud: He eviscerated USAID for being in SpaceX's way, punched a bunch of security holes in critical government IT infrastructure, and made a bunch of really tiny penny-pinching cuts that were almost immediately undone by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act dramatically increasing government spending. Oh, and because of the DOGE cuts, America has new world screwworm again.

The entire premise of DOGE - that there's an exorbitant amount of unidentified waste and fraud that is primarily contained in small-scale discretionary spending programs - is nearly bullshit. I say nearly, because there IS waste and fraud - it's just that the waste and fraud is in the form of well-paid McKinsey consultants and military contractors. Both of which have lobbyists that can get Congress to pass all sorts of bills to enshrine their waste and fraud as politically untouchable, including and especially by DOGE[0]. Ergo, DOGE was doomed from the start to only be able to deal with insignificant amounts of fraud.

- Making reusable rockets: SpaceX's rockets are only partially reusable (the second stage is still disposed of) and they have to spend a lot extra for the equipment to make the first stage and cone able to land. Also, every launch and landing must be paired with an expensive refurbishment process as landing is extremely stressful. In other words, reusable rockets are really dumb.

The reason why SpaceX is doing this really dumb thing is because they run a satellite ISP, Starlink. The problem with satellite Internet is that going up into space increases your latency (thanks, Einstein) and having a lot of people hitting the same satellite lowers the bandwidth it can push. Musk's solution is to put the satellites into a lower orbit - but the problem is, at Low Earth Orbit you can't stay locked to one position on Earth. And satellites are a shared medium: the more people using the service, the worse it gets. So you need a lot more satellites to provide service equivalent to wired ISPs. All these extra satellites in low-Earth orbit create light pollution that makes terrestrial astronomy impossible, and also pollute the orbits they're in with junk if they get damaged.

I'm noticing a bit of a pattern here: Musk suggests something really stupid and thinks we can just engineer our way around the stupidity, because the stupid thing is there specifically to get around an essential expense of the problem. Why is the Vegas Loop a bunch of Teslas and a tunnel that only covers like a quarter of the system? Because the obvious solution - a train - is too expensive to build, and people like Musk want car-like social isolation[1] on every mode of transportation. Why is SpaceX so obsessed with reusable rockets? Because it'll let them spam LEO with satellites, which they need in order for Starlink to work, because just building a wired ISP or a traditional cellular ISP is expensive and fundamentally unsexy work.

At least when Steve Jobs reinvented the wheel, his wheel was usually rounder and smoother.

[0] If there is a theme of the second Trump administration, it is the concept of impoundment. The thing is, this is explicitly unconstitutional; the President cannot refuse to spend money Congress tells them to spend. And corporate interests generally tend to win bigly in court against Trump. So if DOGE had done the smart thing and went after McKinsey, they probably still would have lost.

[1] As an autistic person, I'd accuse this of being an anti-social autistic tendency, but we also really like trains.

I read a variety of sources with differing opinions: the WSJ is in front of me right now and generally dislikes Musk. I’m familiar with Musk calling the man that lived in Thailand a pedophile: he shouldn’t have done that, but realistically, a lot of people would consider an old European man living alone in Pattaya a pedophile - you can’t do that if you’re well known and Musk paid for that.

This discussion about Musk's DOGE comes up time and time again, trying to rationalize his mandate of destroying regulations to eliminate waste. This was not the stated goal, nor was it the immediately result. The post-hoc rationalization is now "DOGE accidentally caught some waste, this was the point" - which is laughable, if it wasn't so sad that the realtime history of what was done wasn't so public.

The people who convince themselves that Musk was doing this as a favor or out of some sense of justice is delusional. From court filings, to reporting at the time, it's clear it was a smash and grab as a favor from Trump, conveniently relieving Musk of pesky regulation while trumpeting DEI.

https://americanoversight.org/investigation/everything-we-kn...