anachronist

He never uses any of his technology. He has never been in any of his rockets. I bet he even gets driven around in the back of a Maybach or something.

What's the advantages of those systems?

I hated Elon before it was cool. 😝

Liberals loved him because they liked to pretend that electric cars are green, and don't require any change to their existing car-dependent lifestyle while still pretending they're saving the earth. Tech utopians loved him because "he's making humanity an interplanetary species". They all ignored his asshole behavior and worker abuse because their hero Steve Jobs (aka Apple Jesus) was also also a tyrant.

A significant aware sliver of them split off after the whole pedo cave thing, but there were a bunch who still would say things like "he's a flawed person but his contribution is too important." A significant segment of them still say this actually, especially the techno utopians who were cheering when his rocket blew up as if that was some kind of success.

There have been solid, foam filled or gell filled bike tires for a long time.

The fundamental problem is that the ring of pressurized air in a pneumatic tire is a shock absorber. When you hit a bump the entire tire (even the part that isn't touching the ground) contributes to the dampening because it turns into a shock wave in the donut of air. When you switch to any sort of tire that doesn't have pressurized air in it, the dampening can only occur by deforming the tire in contact with the ground, and it's not going to be anywhere near as good. Typically you end up with a tradeoff between uncomfortable ride on the one side, and bottoming out on the rim and lots of rolling friction on the other.

In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn't really see it as being more broadly useful.

Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there's just no way they could leave it out there, it's too dangerous for them to do so.

Now I look at the thing we call "the internet" in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never "flipped the switch" on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.

"Western" in this case includes Korea and Taiwan.