Musk saying we’d be enduring hardship has the same vibe as a certain someone who has been recently telling their people to “eat bitter”.
Don’t worry, that hardship will be limited. To the bottom 99%.
Elon: “I’m building an even bigger penis-shaped rocket and naming it the ‘Hardship.’ Get it? Cuz it’s hard? Like a penis? And a ship. Anyone?”
🫲🤪🫱 XYou’re not supposed to root for the hardship. But oh, what am I saying, he obviously doesn’t mean himself. He’s a special pig, more equal than the rest.
Later on, Musk said that he would “balance the budget immediately,” adding: “Obviously, a lot of people who are taking advantage of government are going to be upset about that. I’ll probably need a lot of security, but it’s got to be done. And if it’s not done, we’ll just go bankrupt.”
Dude is not actually talking of himself?
Besides… they are telling people straight up Things gonna go Bad… and they applaud. This Planet develops more and more to a madhouse…
So the GOP has successfully convinced them over the past 4 years that the government is incapable of helping them no matter who is in charge.
Therefore, in their minds, they’d rather that nobody gets anything if it means it prevents a brown person from getting something that they didn’t.
South Africa wants its loser back
I mean…
- Nominal (current) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of South Africa is $405,870,000,000 (USD) as of 2022. https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/south-africa-gdp/
Elon Musk
$269.3B
Real Time Net Worth
as of 10/30/24 (https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/)
One of these values is yearly and real, the other one will crash if he attempts to make it liquid.
There is a point you’re trying to make. Make it.
Shuck my big hairy shlong elmo
Make America feel hardship again.
It’s simple really. We eat the rich.
Says the heir to an emerald mine that has never encountered a single ounce of hardship during his entire waste of time on this planet. He’s never even built anything, the fucker just buys his way in and takes credit for others’ ideas.
Which, btw, he’s an idiot for not just staying quiet and letting people praise him. Imagine for a moment he took the ridiculous wealth he has and kept quietly pointing it at things that help everyone. He would have been beloved and had more influence than he does now. All of it probably costing him less. Alongside many other reasons, this fucking dumb as shit shift he made makes me want to crush him and Trump even more.
Cause like wtf, Musk? You had a clear and easy path to all the power and prestige and recognition you could have ever wanted by helping the world. Instead, you turned into an asshole.
Once you become addicted to praise, it’s hard to live without it.
Look at all the third rate actors and musicians who act like God’s gift…
I think what you mean is attention. He would still have had praise, and less verbal mockery, had he kept up the other route. Instead we got a third rate villain who would be easily demasked without Fred and Velma.
I think he did contribute code to PayPal in the early years but I also remember reading they had to rip it all out it was so bad.
I met Elon in ~1999 when they were pitching us integrating their payment system into our software which was run by a number of the largest firms in the world. Have you ever met a group where one of them is clearly a moron but it is also the best at selling? That’s Elon. We passed because our company was run by nerds without an ounce of corporate in it, but I can easily see how Elon would “wow” an executive dipshit that doesn’t know shit about the product. Elon is a salesman for the tech enthusiasts, not the tech professionals. He sells what they call dreams and we call vaporware.
I’ve suspected such for a long time. Many years ago I used to watch his streamed press conferences. Back when hardly anybody gave a shit about him. He appeared to be the one who does no work at all but hogs the stage during presentations pretending as if he’s the big technical brains of the group. I had a feeling something was off.
I remember on a particular stream during QA time, one of the nerds was able to speak and basically said what Elon was talking about was completely wrong. But in a diplomatic way. That was probably a pivotal moment when I started to figure he’s full of shit. Like when you see it then you can’t unsee it anymore moments.
He’s another steve jobs…dude was an idiot for tech, but a salesman that could sell bananas to monkeys.
This is why elon is dangerous, he’s not dumb, and knows how to sell shit to the masses.
Monkeys love bananas, that would be an easy sell.
It’s harder than you think. First you have sell them on capitalism.
Leaving this here for you: https://communications.yale.edu/sites/default/files/4-7-18_what_monkeys_can_teach_us_about_money_bbc.pdf
A better analogy would have been “Selling ice to penguins”
Give it a few years.
“We”? There’s no “we” dipshit, not when you can afford to buy and sell rockets while most working class are living on a diet of beans and rice, suffering roommates to make rent, all while working 40-90hrs a week for $7.50-$15 an hour.
Question, I hear things like that on lemmy often. Is there some data source that I can point to if I want to repeat it. I work in tech and honestly don’t go out much. I also have kids and live in an old neighborhood that is right next to new expensive ones. So I don’t really know anyone personally that is living paycheck to paycheck. And no one would believe me if I talked about it without data and a source.
When you figure the basics, the math tracks.
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$7.50/hr is $60/day is $1200/mo, before taxes are taken out. So $1200 is by no means take home pay. Where do you imagine rent or a mortgage acquired today tracks at 50% of that? Then there’s all the things you need to work: clothes, transportation, electricity and running water, a phone, soaps, shoes, food to fuel you for that job.
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$15/hr is $120/day is $2400/mo before taxes. Maybe in the Midwest or the crappier parts of the south you can live solo. Again though, you’re looking at beans and rice. Maybe some leg meat chicken and eggs if you think you can splurge that week.
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Bank of America released this, this month: https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/paycheck-to-paycheck-lower-income-households.html
Their estimate is 1/4 of families live paycheck to paycheck. It reaches as high as $150k/yr. The $150k is probably someone with a mortgage. Cost of DIY materials, tools, and any tradesman work has doubled and on some cases tripled. Example: I put a storm door in a house for $250, with installation, in 2019. In 2021 that same door without installation, me figuring it out, is $350 off the shelf. You used to be able to get a tradesman out and actually be billed $350, $400, $250, and so on. Now, your licensed tradesmen often have $1k a day minimums just to show up. Home ownership can now break you instead of save you. Home ownership is not what it was pre 2020.
What’s unique here is as a bank they can parse out necessity from want shopping.
There’s a lot on Google dates after 10/22/24 on paycheck to paycheck, but much of it appears to be scraping this document to write redundant articles.
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Forbes has this, written before the BoA article: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/
A lot of this is survey responses and savings capacity. So not unique.
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Here’s a winning essay from Ursinus College arguing for raising the minimum wage. Lots of citations, do your own research to chase down those citations: https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/ethics_essay/23/
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Mostly, just talk to people. Insurances are insane lately. That alone has added ~$950/mo to my necessities and I have a good driving record, not a single medical diagnosis, bundle discount, no kids on health insurance, and I haven’t claimed anything on the homeowners, ever, in 20 yrs. And yet.
Here how about something like this?
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/
Do you actually need a source for a lot of people being poor in a nation where the bottom half of the country earns 9% of the income and has near zero wealth?
It’s probably Elon trying to figure out how to do research on how he screwed up during his little e-town hall.
A relative this afternoon actually came over to my house this afternoon, burst into the living room to sit down and start going off on how they thought Elon was actually trolling trump and trying to lose the election for him.
Until I explained about the guy being born with a silver spoon shoved so far up his ass he probably has no idea what things on grocery store shelves, utility bills, or Walmart socks bought in bulk even cost. The relative thought Elon was self made. Ha! Daddy funded. He has no idea how we live.
“Most importantly, we have to reduce spending to live within our means,” he said, adding that these efforts will “involve some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
Hey Musk. F******ccckkkk Yooooooooooo
But we can’t face any hardships to save the planet. Gotcha.
He has $270.3 billion dollars, which at $50K per year would take almost 3.5 million years to earn, and he’s preaching to us about cutting back. What a guy.
He took a bonus of like 60 billion dollars just for running a company that would have been successful without him. That’s money that could have been given to employees that actually make a difference in the company. So again I say F**************CCCKKKK YYYYYYOOOOOOOOO*
When will these conservative dumbfucks learn that austerity never works. They try it over and over in different countries and it literally never works.
It works just fine for the very wealthy who would never be caught dead using the same underfunded services that the commoners rely on.
But they don’t understand that if they weren’t such selfish assholes, they’d have it better as well, because society evolves.
That’s why there were centuries of kings who lived as lavishly as they could, while society went nowhere and people shat in the streets. They still lived in shitty castles without running water.
They just lack imagination so much and are so afraid of losing status. Dumb fucks.
The main ingredients of conservatism are greed, hatred and ignorance. Coincidentally these are also the things the Buddha identified as the sources of all human suffering.
“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” ― Socrates
Greed and hatred weren’t that much of a problem for Socrates apparently, but they both agree that ignorance is fucking bad. And the Greeks had two words for it (at least), separating a lack of ability from a refusal to understand.
https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/
“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”
Return to sender, please.
