cowmix
Joined 16 years ago
Joined 16 years ago
It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined.
What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability.
It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.
At some point, accumulated wealth becomes power, and that power can be used to pull energy, attention, labor, and public resources out of the system for one person’s agenda.
And in Tesla’s case, the stock value creation story is insanely unorthodox, to be charitable. A lot of that valuation was supercharged by years of market-moving hype done personally by Elon: 10+ years of FSD timelines that never happened, the more recent “buy a Tesla, it’s an appreciating asset!” super-lie, the mission gradually being abandoned, GOP craps on EVs and it’s crickets from Elon, etc.
Now we have the ultimate example of wealth gravity distortion: Musk helped put Trump back in power, and the relationship looks openly transactional. But Elon is not just benefiting from Trump’s transactional nature. He is also benefiting from an administration where white collar crime and regulatory accountability seem to have basically stopped being real things.
So with all that, the kind of shady behavior Elon pulled that might normally trigger government scrutiny or enforcement is now being smothered by political influence.
Even today, Tesla appears to be the highest P/E outlier in the S&P 500 among profitable companies. So the market is not just valuing the current business. It is valuing the story, the hype, and increasingly Musk’s ability to buy influence to stay outta trouble.
And to be clear, I’m not trying to pretend nothing real was built. SpaceX is impressive. Tesla really did help kickstart the EV market. But that does not make up for the harm, distortion, and unaccountable power being exercised now.
So yes, maybe the wealth was “created” in an accounting sense. But the concern is what happens when that created value becomes an unaccountable force acting on everything else.
Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable.
I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power.
And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.
I run Resolve under CachyOS using the project I mentioned -- everything works afaict.
When I use the Atlassian CLI vs their MCP server, I tend to see something like half the token burn with the CLI with more accurate results.
That could be an Atlassian issue but that's the results I'm seeing.