I'm still baffled by how 'deregulation' isn't an extremely alarming word, not just in the current year or era, but overall.
Not to mention that in the current context only rich people want deregulation & it's clear why (to pollute more, hurt workers through wages and work conditions more, pay less taxes, and to be able to deal with competitors as they wish with monopoly being the actively pursued goal).
The chances of over-regulation hurting the people are really small.
Over- or under- regulation isn't the same as good or bad regulation. You can have good and bad regulations both in the sense of standards and methodology, as well as in the sense of bad implementation.
Fuck consumers workers and the environment, more PROFITS baby!!
For some reason Republicans can't see that regulations tend to happen when companies fail to act responsibly in favor of profits.
Deregulation of financial markets caused the financial crisis, because the markets exploited it for new "tricks", that were irresponsible.
Deregulation of consumer protections clearly harm consumers, and the same with environment.
There are also standards regulations that stimulate competition, and greatly increase industry efficiency.
“The matrix.” Dude, you are a billionaire. You hang out with billionaires, and the most powerful public officials in the world. You are the matrix. Fuck off with this gaslighting fake-populist bullshit.
When assholes like Musk and Friedman say garbage like this, they are advocating for taking away people’s power. People as collective wield power through government. They want to, instead, concentrate power in a small ruling elite class of oligarchs. It’s fundamentally un-democratic, and un-American.
Also, remember he believes in that "simulation theory" nonsense. And the reason tech bros like him believe in it is that it gives them the excuse to treat everyone else like shit. Because, you see, they're NPCs. Unlike Elon. He's got full awareness programming.
More specifically, he is a billionaire who once thought that AI could be extremely dangerous if developed improperly...
... and has lately developed AI improperly, gotten into feuds with other people developing AI, is currently attempting to build an army of economy tier androids as well as literal fucking brain chips so that humans can be cyborgs some day soon.
He would easily fit into the early timeline of The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix, you know, as one of the emblematic vain and greedy narcissists who set the downfall of mankind into motion.
When he says 'the matrix', he means 'the interests of the average worker'.
Remember, this is the same guy trying to sue to the National Labor Relations Board out of existence, because things like workplace safety and overtime pay and not having racist workplaces are inefficient.
Also... fucking what, he talked with Trump about how to reduce the national debt?
Ok 1, thats almost certainly just going to translate into auesterity, ie, dovetailing with Project 2025 to gut a whole bunch of government agencies...
2... Trump has expanded the national debt more than any other President in history, and is so astoundingly economically incompetent he wants to remove all (?) taxes and replace this with a 20% across the board import tariff, which would basically detonate the economy.
Remember, this is the same guy trying to sue to the National Labor Relations Board out of existence, because things like workplace safety and overtime pay and not having racist workplaces are inefficient.
This is a guy who was willing to compromise workplace safety simply because he doesn't like high vis colors. Who fired an entire department that was in the middle of work that's critical to the future of the company, simply because he was upset that their boss tried to argue that they shouldn't gut the team arbitrarily.
Efficiency I can understand, it's a rational priority to pursue. Elon is a mentally unstable weirdo who either doesn't care how much damage he does to the business, or is so disconnected from reality that he can't really understand what he's doing.
He's not just a typical corporate scumbag doing greedy things. He's basically an aspiring Bioshock villain. If he was half as competing as he thinks he is, he'd be ruling a dystopian nightmare city on Mars by now.
Sigh, an efficiency commission sounds like a way to to form a group of loyalists who has the power to arbitrarily decide on policy for any government agency based on a loose definition of "efficiency".
A group like that could simply decide that a private company is allways more efficient than a government agency, or that a deregulated market is more efficient than a regulated market.
The goal of "efficiency" is increadibly vauge, while sounding positive.
I know it sounds weird, but if a country has a legal minimum wage it removes tools from unions since companies can just tell the unions to pound sand.
Here in Sweden we don't have any minimum wage mandated by the government.
It is negotiated between the sector unions and employers.
Also sympathy strikes are legal here.
Whenever there have been talks about introducing a minimum wage in Sweden, unions have allways reacted negatively, as it would effectively prevent them from negotiating for higher wages, and a minimum wage would easily get stuck in the past.
I know that the US and Sweden are very different, and that in the current labor market in the US, removing a minimum wage would be a disaster, but I felt as if your conclusion that minimum wage is allways bad needed a counterpoint.
I don’t understand the power of trump over this guy. Isn’t he richer than trump? Didn’t trump posted a derogatory tweet about him saying something like “he’ll kneel if I’ve asked”
If Trump cancels EV subsidies or pressures NASA to stop bankrolling SpaceX, Musk is basically fucked.
That is why Trump said that.
As with most giant corporations, if the government stopped heavily subsidizing them in many direct and many more indirect ways, they would basically collapse under their own incompetence quite quickly.
Its truly funny to watch libertarian types pretend they built their empires from the ground up, when the truth is that they basically always started from a very privileged background, more or less did shady things bordering on or actually being fraud, got some of their parent's or parent's friends to invest, and then grew further from massive government aid of one kind or another.
The family were rich: a punt on an emerald mine by Errol Musk, an engineer, had delivered a fortune. But he and Maye, a model from Canada, left raising Elon and his younger siblings, Tosca and Kimbal, to black servants.