If his wealth were a US treasury bond, he’d have to spend at least $50,000,000 every DAY in order to not still keep getting richer.

Take a moment to think about how difficult it is to spend $50,000,000. If I gave you 24 hours to do it using Brewster’s Millions rules, you’d struggle.

There is no good reason for billionaires to exist.

I guess Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were just hapless chaps stumbling around in the dark, until Elon lighted their way with his genius vision of how to build an EV. /s

So much so I had to google their names because even I can’t remember them.

He could declare bankruptcy and be a billionaire again tomorrow.

And I don’t say this out of any kind of admiration for him; just there’s still enough moneyed rubes out there that he could set up a new company making plumbuses and it would hit unicorn status by the end of the day.

You’re forgetting retired women.

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Well done. I’m like most people in that I didn’t spot it until he started talking about a subject I knew about. The first Tesla Roadster looked amazing¹, and then the hyperloop sounded like a cool idea², and then oh wait what’s he saying about software development now?

¹ because its body was made by Lotus

² except it doesn’t work

A lot of their success seems to be recognising an opportunity before anyone else

Pretty much everyone in the world has at some point in their lives had some idea or spotted some gap in the market that could be a successful product, but 99% of us don’t get to act on that because the rent is due and will be due again next month.

Look at that young whippersnapper. I had one for my discman.

Sure, I’m just bemoaning the fact that you’ve taken cloud hosting to be the default. It’s as much a complaint about the world in general as anything specific to you. Good luck with it all.

As designed. It proves you actually read the question.

I’m old enough to consider the framing of the question to be weirdly loaded.

It does not feel that long ago where people would be asked to justify entrusting their product’s functions and data to a bunch of strangers who can make unilateral decisions about your service with zero comeback. Now we’re being asked to justify not doing that.

There seems to be a common thread amongst all the Japanese camera manufacturers that their software is all “this must be done in exactly this (often convoluted) way”.

I’m convinced that they put their hardware engineers in charge of writing the software.

Commerce isn’t the same thing as capitalism.

Yeah, the second one. It’s the ones prepared to do shit like that who get promoted in the first place.

This is true, but it’s also not helped by the fact that the web itself has gotten worse. A lot of stuff that previously would have been on a crawlable page is now on an amorphous infinite scroll feed behind a login screen, or worse still a YouTube video.

What’s currently pickling my noggin is how I’ve been seeing “new model smashes benchmarks by an unexpectedly huge factor” headlines every month for the last two years, and yet somehow no matter how many models suddenly score 99% on tasks that they used to score 20% for, I’ve not actually found the damn thing any more helpful or reliable than it was in 2023 for anything real-world. I’m starting to think all these supposed breakthroughs they keep having are being hugely overstated.

Yeah, kind of my point was that y’all are viewing it as a “field trip”, which is typically a specific event that’s infrequent, carefully organized and supervised, which is a whole different beast to the generic standing instructions of “we’re not going to supervise your kids if they wander off school grounds” slip.

For the former case it’s pretty much understood that everyone in class should be able to join a field trip, but for the latter it’s not unusual for parents to decline and therefore teachers would absolutely be expected to enforce the rules.

For the benefit of the many non-Brits complaining about how unrealistic it is: the Leaving School Grounds Unsupervised form is (when I grew up at least) a huge social divider and Big Deal in a lot of British schools. There was a whole micro industry at mine where the ~70% of kids who were allowed out would provide delivery services for sweets and pop for the 30% who weren’t.

JKR didn’t just pull this whole thing out her ass, it was something that most British kids will have instantly related to. (She’s still an awful human mind)

The image of China as an uncreative, uneducated backwards nation of drones good only for assembling phones, hasn’t been the reality for at least a decade.

A lot of people in the West don’t realize this because to this day there’s a vicious cycle of people only import cheap Chinese crap because China has a reputation for only making cheap crap because people only import the cheap crap. They don’t realize that China is also making top tier products, because nobody’s trying to import top tier Chinese products.

Your life can be so much better if you get over the notion of having to own things. Almost every luxury out there can be enjoyed without having to own it, as long as you’re able to discard the consumerist propaganda that you’ve not enjoyed it properly unless you can take it home.