Tesla – Pain In The Bud

Tech Oligarchs Can’t Distinguish Science Fiction From Reality

When people with nearly unlimited power and money want to reshape society in the image of fanciful fiction and they’re unable to separate fantasy from reality, that’s a problem for all of us.

More than a few times over the past few years I’ve read comments from the tech oligarchs — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and company — and thought, “He’s definitely read [insert science fiction novel here.]”

Zuckerberg, for instance, was clearly besotted with Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash when he renamed his company Meta and poured a literal fortune into his watered down version of the metaverse imagined in the novel.

Snow Crash came out in 1992 before the vast majority of people had dial-up internet, let alone a concept of cyberspace or the always-on, interactive mobile internet of today. It’s hugely influential among tech enthusiasts, and it’s one reason Stephenson and other SF novelists were paid to be “idea guys” for tech companies.

Now Musk has name-dropped Iain Banks in a viral interview with The Economist this week, which ended with the wealthiest man in human history going into a full meltdown and throwing a tantrum over sensible, obvious questions. It’s remarkable that a man who built a peerless business empire has the emotional maturity of a toddler, although the closer you look at Musk’s businesses, the more it becomes obvious their valuations are not tethered to reality any more than he is.

The problem is that Musk, like the others, moves through life in a bubble surrounded by people who tell him he walks on water, and no one in his orbit would dream of suggesting he’s confused about something, let alone actually mistaken. Yes, Elon! That’s brilliant, Elon! You are a gift to all mankind, Elon!

Elon’s favorite science fiction

When The Economist’s interviewer pressed Musk on his contradictory views about society and equality, Musk told her she should read Banks’ work. Unfortunately either he hasn’t read it either, or somehow managed to make it through those thick volumes without absorbing themes that may as well be emblazoned in neon.

Banks, for the uninitiated, was a Scottish science fiction writer of astonishing talent.

He was best known for writing a series of novels collectively known as The Culture, which portray a far future utopia, a post-scarcity human society. The Culture is run by ultra-benevolent, conscientious AIs called Minds who not only serve as the serene caretakers and shepherds of humanity, but oversee all the automation and logistics that transform society into the prosperous, fair and idyllic commonwealth the novels imagine. Machines, in other words, do all the work people don’t want to do.

When I read The Culture novels, I saw what almost everybody else sees: the work of an author who is uncomfortable with ideological extremes, views a blended socialist model as possible and even preferable in a situation where resources are no longer scarce, and is more than willing to kick the crap out of the society he imagined by showing its worst aspects, cognitive dissonances and potential pitfalls, perhaps as a warning not to take it too seriously. (And as a humble admission that he’s just making this stuff up, so really, don’t get carried away with it.)

All of it is rendered in gorgeous, shimmering prose, populated by characters who are a riot to spend time with, and garnished with dialog that reveals a rare gift for capturing the rhythms and beauty of the English language.

Banks, unfortunately, is no longer around. He died in 2013 after a diagnosis of incurable gall bladder cancer, and the literary world is significantly poorer for that loss.

But he made his political views known in interviews and his personal life in addition to his novels, which is why it’s hard to believe Musk thinks MAGA and Trumpism are atavistic forms of The Culture‘s utopian, fair society.

On the one hand, Musk claims we’re 10 years from the kind of post-scarcity society portrayed in science fiction novels, that we’ll all have endless resources and get to fill our days pursuing our personal interests because money won’t mean anything. It’s an aspirational if unrealistic claim.

On the other hand, as The Economist’s interviewer pointed out, Musk has been relentless in his hoarding of wealth, gives no money to charity, and seems to amuse himself primarily by pouring fuel on the culture war fires.

Culture wars, rage bait and pseudo-andriea (ψευδανδρεία)

The tech CEO and world’s wealthiest man is remarkably committed to playing the heel online.

He constantly wades into arguments regardless of whether he knows anything about the subject matter. He delights in making incendiary comments about topics like Islam and immigration. And he is seemingly incapable of going one day without showing us his inner child.

“I literally challenged Vladimir Putin to one on one physical combat over Ukraine” he wrote on X last year before crediting himself and his Starlink service for the smaller country’s battlefield successes against Russia.

A few months later he bragged that he was the first “[A]merican druid in [D]iablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA,” which might be the second-most ridiculous thing a human being has written, surpassed only by his fantasy of the entire world cheering as he defeats Putin mano e mano. (Musk lied about his video game “accomplishments,” unsurprisingly. Gamers, who are not as credulous as Musk imagines, quickly figured out that moneybags paid a pro gamer to log into his account, play as him, and achieve the top ranking so the world could unite in awe at Elon Musk’s magnificent button-pushing skills. 1337, ladies and gentlemen.)

He cleared the Abattoir of Zir! Hand this man a Medal of Freedom, give him the powers that used to belong to congress and let him cook! And if he wants to cosplay as Achilles and Hector Vladimir Putin into surrendering, wonderful! It’ll save us billions in munitions and aid to Ukraine.

As The Economist’s interviewer continued asking follow-ups about Musk’s imaginary technological heaven, the trillionaire was “so agitated by facing real questions that he just resorted to whining about how awful the media can be. He seemed to think that his popularity on X, the platform he owns, was evidence that most people actually love him,” Gizmodo noted:

“A quarter billion people follow me,” Musk said, referring to his X followers, adding “I think a lot more people actually like me than don’t.” The billionaire then said that “a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.”

Beddoes acknowledged that many people hate journalists, but Musk kept going, repeating “they hate you, they hate you,” like an emotionally wounded child. Musk, flailing, tried to come up with some way to attack The Economist specifically.

“There are more people that die in Europe from heat deaths than people that die from gun deaths in America. Why aren’t you writing an article about air conditioning?” asked Musk.

“Well, we’ve done several on air conditioning, and we had on our cover last week a whole long piece about…” said Beddoes.

“Pro-air conditioning?” Musk asked sheepishly.

“Very pro-air conditioning,” she responded. “You should read us sometime.”

Peter Thiel plays a Lvl 82 Mage

Musk and Zuckerberg aren’t the only ones.

Peter Thiel occupies a different realm. The man who runs the most comprehensive database on the personal details of Americans, whose company enjoys government contracts worth billions and has surpassed every federal agency as the avatar of Big Brother, not only named his business after a wizard’s magical device from The Lord of the Rings, but has spent the last year or two on a worldwide tour in which he lectures attendees on the anti-Christ.

Drawing on the work of Vladimir Solovyov (the 19th century Russian philosopher, not the Putin propagandist who dresses like the admiral of a galactic war fleet), and combining it with peculiar fringe Catholicism, Thiel likes to tell his audiences that the anti-Christ is inbound, he’ll be a technocrat who speaks often of peace and human rights, and he’ll be helped by evil villains like people advocating for AI safety and environmental stewardship.

Very convenient, that. In Thiel’s telling, the anti-Christ’s minions are precisely the same people who want guardrails on his businesses.

In addition to being an obvious fan of The Lord of the Rings, Thiel lists the aforementioned Stephenson as a major influence along with Atlas Shrugged and Dangerous by Milo Yiannopolous. I’m not even going to comment on that except to say what awful company for Stephenson.

These are windows into the world view of a paranoid man who now controls all of our data and wants us to be assured we’re very safe in the hands of Peter Thiel, who will safeguard our browsing habits and protect us from the anti-Christ and his minions.

Bezos, too, is a fan of Stephenson, Banks et al, and his public statements indicate he saw what he wanted to see in those stories regardless of what their authors intended.

Understanding the books that spark the imagination of men with so much power is, I’d argue, an essential element in understanding how they think, what they want, and where they believe they’re taking us as a species.

Because make no mistake, these men believe they will decide the future of humanity. What happens from here is impossible to predict, but we’d be negligent to dismiss the collective power and influence of the wealthiest individuals in the history of our species, men who can not only outright buy small countries but also own enormously influential media platforms, private spaceflight companies and communications networks. Amazon Web Services, for example, provides almost a third of all cloud services worldwide, while tens of millions use Starlink to access the internet in more than 160 countries.

In their view, the tech oligarchs will determine what happens from here. Not democratically elected politicians, not voters themselves, not people who have devoted their lives to studying how society works.

They don’t feel indebted to the rest of our species and don’t envision giving us a seat at the table. In an attempt to explain why he doesn’t donate money to charity and sits on an incomparable mountain of wealth like an autistic Smaug, Musk says his work itself is so valuable that no amount of charitable giving could match the gifts he already bestows on mankind. That’s also why he courts mates with a charming pick-up line (“Want to have my babies?“) and maintains a compound in Texas where his concubines raise his Little Musks, who have names like Æ 么-010011 Ʃrik Technomancer and ąƬh33ną Sŏmni-4ㆁ4.

Propagating his Muskian DNA, he believes, is the greatest gift he could give to humankind alongside the technology products produced by his companies.

Tech oligarchs think they’re destined to usher us into a glorious new era in which people live on Mars and Europa, our eyes collectively turn to interstellar colonization, the evil forces of evil (anyone skeptical of them) will be defeated along with the anti-Christ, and this society will be idyllic and judicious with everyone standing as “equals” save the immortal oligarchs, who will occupy permanent positions above humanity, their lives extended indefinitely by the medichines, nanobot-supplemented blood and cybernetic enhancements that exist in their favorite novels.

They, of course, will decide how resources are divided, where research money is diverted, which projects take priority. That’s a scary thought when you consider none of them have expressed much compassion for society’s least fortunate, and some of them have long records of hostility toward people at the bottom.

It’s bad enough that they are staunch in their conviction that their wealth makes them best-qualified to determine our collective future. If they can’t distinguish between fiction and reality, that’s very much our problem whether we like it or not.

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‘Every Time We Needed To Refill, They Charged Us More’: FDA Says 2 US Women Made Millions Off Desperate People Whose Cats Had FIPV

The importers are accused of jacking up prices almost 16 fold on FIPV drugs they illegally imported from China, the FDA says.

FIPV is pretty much a guaranteed death sentence for cats, and the only way to cure it is with an experimental drug that doesn’t have FDA approval.

Oregon’s Nancy Ross and Nicole Randall of Texas knew that, and as importers selling the cure via the popular Facebook group FIP Warriors, the FDA says they banked on the desperation of people who would do almost anything to save their cats — including forking over vast sums of money.

Ross and Randall are now accused by the FDA of smuggling GS-441524 from China, where it’s manufactured illegally, and hiking the price by almost 16 times what they paid for it as they served as the middle women between desperate cat owners and the suppliers in Hong Kong.

Feline infectious peritonitis kills some 95 percent of cats it infects, and veterinarians often tell their clients with FIPV cats that while they can’t prescribe GS-441524, they will help administer it, track their cats’ progress through bloodwork and hopefully save feline lives — if the clients obtain the drug themselves.

FIP Warriors — now in its fifth incarnation as FIP Warriors 5.0 on Facebook — is where people with FIPV cats go to find suppliers. The group has more than 43,000 members, and the FDA says Randall made millions off of them, charging as much as $385 for vials of GS-441524 she obtained for between $25 and $45 from manufacturers in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Randall sold $9.6 million worth of GS-441524 to clients in the US, according to the FDA. Per The Oregonian:

“A spreadsheet found in Randall’s Google email showed customer orders of at least 58,460 vials and 236,836 pills of GS-441524 from July 2020 through June 6, 2022, the affidavit said.”

PITB spoke to several people who paid thousands of dollars for GS-441524 after their cats were diagnosed with FIPV. All of them said they were surprised by the news of the FDA’s investigation, and said they were given various reasons for why the drug was so expensive to acquire.

One customer from Texas, whose cat Seth began his regimen in July of 2020, told PITB she doesn’t regret spending the money to cure Seth, but she “can see how the people saw our desperate situation and took advantage of us.” She was told prices were at a premium because of scarcity.

“It was a very stressful time for us, and every time we needed to refill, they charged us more,” she said. “They knew we couldn’t say no.”

Another woman, whose kitten was diagnosed with FIPV in 2021, “was told that the prices were set because they ensure the medication was purchased from a trusted source.”

As a college student at the time, she used her savings and crowdfunded the other half, paying more than $5,000 for her kitten’s treatment. She said she doesn’t think the administrators of the group were ripping her off, since they had FIP cats of their own, and likely didn’t know the importers were making huge profits. She trusted the seller — who was not Ross or Randall — because the group vouched for that person, assuring her they supplied real pills.

“Of course, I don’t think this is a valid justification for hiking up prices up to 16x the amount,” she told PITB, “but I’m sincerely hoping the individual [accused by the FDA] had a valid reason for setting the prices that she did.”

Others paid even more exorbitant prices: a British woman we interviewed for a story about FIPV in 2022 said she paid about £7,000, or $9,400 at the time.

FDA investigators said they intercepted shipments from China and Hong Kong disguised as COVID masks, cat shampoo and chewable medicine for pets, and the Oregonian report says the shipments were listed as “essential oils” and “beauty products” in import documents.

Randall and Ross have not been charged criminally, but they are now targets of a civil asset forfeiture case:

“The government seized five of Randall’s bank and brokerage accounts and her 2022 Tesla Model Y car last year based on a warrant signed by a federal magistrate judge in Oregon.

The warrant identified the bank accounts and car as proceeds from the “crime of smuggling” and subject to forfeiture, according to the affidavit. It also alleged Randall, now 35, used the proceeds to buy several properties, including a ranch in Leander, Texas, in July 2021.”

While the FDA’s affidavit went into detail regarding Randall’s earnings, it describes shipments sent to Ross but does not specify how much she may have made in profit. An attorney for Randall told The Oregonian that the Texas woman will fight the civil asset forfeiture.

The illegal market for GS-441524 exists because the drug’s creator, Gilead Sciences of California, declined to submit it to the FDA for approval. That’s because it’s chemically similar to another drug the company makes, remdesivir, which was floated as a possible treatment for COVID-19. The company was worried any snags in a potential approval process for GS-441524 would also ensnare remdesivir, according to reports, putting the latter drug in limbo during the pandemic.

Now that the pandemic has retreated to much lower levels of infection and death, it’s not clear if Gilead Sciences will reconsider its FIPV medication, but there may be hope in the form of alternate treatments. A report from the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) says scientists at the University of California-Davis and UC San Diego are working on several promising therapies, including a potential treatment using CRISPR gene-editing technology.

But until another cure or treatment passes trials and earns FDA approval — a process that could take years — people with FIPV-diagnosed cats remain at the mercy of strangers on the internet, spending thousands of dollars per regimen and hoping the drugs they buy are the real deal.

‘Elon Musk Killed My Cats,’ Britney Spears’ Sister Claims

Jamie Lynn Spears says she’s run over “I don’t want to tell you how many cats” with her Tesla because it doesn’t make enough noise.

Coronavirus. Unprecedented income inequality. Instability. Millions of religious minorities wasting away in Chinese government concentration camps.

The world is a mess right now and sometimes it’s difficult to know where to start, but thankfully Jamie Lynn Spears — unintelligible mumbler, erstwhile country music singer and younger sister of Britney — is here to set our priorities straight.

“The Tesla is a secret cat killer, and it’s a problem that we really gotta fix,” a purple-haired Spears told her followers in a video she uploaded to Instagram a few days ago.

“We have now lost — I don’t want to tell you how many cats — because they don’t hear the Tesla crank and unfortunate things happen and it’s really devastating and tragic for everyone involved,” Spears said.

Perfectly understandable. I mean, who doesn’t run over a cat or six while backing out of the driveway? And who wants to be bothered with actually caring for cats and keeping them indoors when you can tell your 2.1 million Instagram followers that a corporation is at fault?

“Like, one of those noises”

Thankfully, Jamie Lynn has a solution, which she also shared with her followers.

“So since the Tesla is so quiet, maybe you could, like, make one of those noises that, like, bother cat or animal ears when it cranks up, so that, like, they know something’s happening and they aren’t caught off guard, and things don’t end in a very tragic way,” Spears continued, indicating she’s spent a lot of time ruminating on this issue. “So, Elon Musk, let’s figure this out, B, because you owe me a couple of cats.”

Like other celebrities, Spears was apparently expecting to air her thoughts and have the entire internet break into a slow clap and say “You’re so right! Hooray for you!” And like other celebrities, Spears deleted the video and furiously backpedaled when people started questioning her claims.

Jamie Lynn Spears at Walmart — Jamie Lynn Spears, net worth $6 million, sister of Britney Spears (net worth $59 million), shopping at Walmart.

The first thing people wanted to know was: Just how many cats did Jamie Lynn lose to Evil Elon Musk and the Teslarizer?

Was it 1) “I don’t want to tell you how many cats” as Spears first indicated, 2) “A couple of cats” as Spears claimed in a follow-up video, or 3) Zero cats, as Spears claimed in a follow-up post to her follow-up video?

After looking into the camera and flatly declaring that Elon Musk owes her “a couple cats,” as if they’re replaceable products, Spears wrote that she “did not run over any cats” and Tesla is “not to be blamed.”

Let’s collab, yo. I got mad ideas!

“I was only making a suggestion about something I think would be extremely helpful, and the geniuses at @Teslamotors are the best to go to for said issue,” she concluded, suggesting Tesla should contact her to “collaborate” on a solution.

We’re sure the industry-disrupting engineers and other geniuses working for Tesla would have been thrilled to collaborate with a mind of Spears’ caliber, but alas they won’t get the opportunity.

That’s because Teslas and other electric cars are already required by law to make a persistent sound when traveling at low speeds, a tweak made at the behest of the American Council of the Blind.

Although Spears got a bit shy after she didn’t receive the ovation she was expecting and refused to clarify how many cats she’s killed with her Teslas, we know the number is at least one. In another recent video, Spears’ similarly purple-haired toddler is seen saying her cat, Turkey (*sniff*), was “in heaven.”

We are sorry Turkey had the misfortune of being adopted by a living indictment of the American education system, and we hope rescue and shelter organizations within 50 miles of Spears’ trailer decline to adopt cats out to her in the future, lest they end up on Musk’s tab.

And if you think we’re being too harsh on Spears, we’d ask you: What kind of world do we live in when someone is allowed to casually kill animals through her own negligence with complete impunity? We’re talking about life here, not broken toys or kitchen appliances.