Well he did try to overturn that election, but he failed. So I guess that makes him a failed fascist last time around. This time he’s trying much harder. Let’s make sure he fails again.

To be fair, “guidelines” and “rules” are two different things. There’s no strict prohibition on politics in the guidelines. If you read the whole thing in context, it’s trying to discourage topics that are mundane, frivolous, or vacuous — not to prohibit all politics.

“MOST stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”

Emphasis mine

If someone screams at you, they are actively invading your space.

On the other hand, if you actively click on an article, read it, and make multiple posts on it, well that’s on you.

This article is #1 on news.ycombinator.com/active right now. Obviously top of mind for a lot of us right now. Pretty hard to find it without the /active, though.

Right. But the whole point is that it isn't on the front page and vastly fewer people know about /active, since it isn't even in the navbar.

for real, i'm embarassed to say I just learned about /active from these comments after using hn for years.

In the eyes of some in leadership, tech workers should be apolitical worker drones. Weighing in on politics is for people like David Sacks, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk.

No one will be held to account as long as Trump or his collaborators are in power.

If anyone views the current situation as a problem, there is no viable solution that doesn’t involve removing MAGA from power.

That’s true if you want to keep the peace. The way to read their actions is that they’re trying to incite violence.

If Trump can incite violence then he can invoke the insurrection act, or perhaps declare some form of martial law to seize more power. Perhaps even parlay this into cancelling the midterm elections.

Or simply that the current ICE and Border Patrol agents are too poorly trained to act as law enforcement.

Which, given the statistic that a decent percentage of ICE applicants can't get a passing score on an open book test [0] doesn't surprise me.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-is-reportedly-hiring-p...

It’s easy enough to avoid clicking on articles containing “Greenland”, “ICE”, etc. if you don’t want to talk about those things. Is it also necessary to make sure that none of your fellow nerds talk about those things either?

I consider tech workers to be “my tribe” and am curious to know what others think about what’s happening in the world around us.

I’ve considered Elon to be a bit of a bullshitter for almost as long as I’ve followed him. Back when he was an opportunistic Democrat, and now that he’s an ideological MAGA, his public statements always seemed to set off my bullshit detector. It seemed clear to me that his intention was more to manipulate perception rather than to disseminate factual information. While most business leaders are guilty of this to some degree, with Elon it seemed more cynically and nakedly so.

I’ve also come to consider him to be a skilled business person. He negotiated a ridiculous low price for the Fremont ex-NUMMI plant. He secured funding to enable Tesla to survive the GFC. The list goes on. I’d argue that Elon’s biggest wins were business related, not technical. Not that there weren’t technical accomplishments, it’s just that the technological accomplishments were more incremental SV type stuff whereas the business accomplishments were more heroic. I also give Tesla credit for the success of model S. But I consider that to be a function of good execution, not of technology. If that would have flopped it would have been the end. But there were many possible ways for Tesla to die back then.

One of Elon’s key business skills is his ability to sell a narrative. I guess that goes hand in hand with the “bullshitter” thing. He seems to have a magical ability to hypnotize fanboys and investors into believing that Tesla is more than it actually is.

The auto industry is not very sexy from an investor point of view. It’s a mature market, very capital intensive, high risk, low margin. Yet somehow Tesla achieves an outsized market cap.

As humorously noted in the HBO Silicon Valley “no revenue” scene, investors reward you for future promises and punish you on actual delivery. But what if you could promise a future that remains perpetually in the future? And every delivery is not an end, but only a step along the way to this utopian/distopian vision? What if you “promise the moon”, er, I mean Mars? If you did this, then maybe you could have a perpetual pure play that never expires.

So back to the article. Is this the demise of Tesla? I don’t know if Tesla necessarily has “no path forward” as “just a car company”. But I think Elon’s ability to sell the “sci-fi future” is wearing out. Tesla has delivered on some difficult business cases with incremental technology, but the track record on the “impossible future“ stuff isn’t good. Also, the mainstream EV industry will become increasingly commoditized with new Chinese entrants, eroding margins. Tariffs keep you in saturated markets and don’t help you in growing markets. So maybe a bit of a demise for all?

There may be some truth to that. But if we get too cynical, the battle is lost before it’s begun!