Musk is a talented guy and certainly is changing the world, but I don’t trust him based upon the way he lives his personal life. You can’t remake nature into what you want it to be. It just is.
Ah, corporate indoctrination. That's why the CEOs aren't fans of remote work for their employees. Plus remote workers are actually able to have a life outside of the corporate realm.
I actually enjoy being in the office and interacting with real people all day... it's just that living anywhere close to an office is a bit of a nightmare these days
I have a feeling these tech billionaires are going to have a second epiphany later in life. Right now they collectively realized a Democrat regime is suicidal, by retirement they'll realize a Republican regime is a slower version of the same, and 'then' Musk and his ilk will look at what your next article suggests.
As smart as they claim and appear to be they seemingly lack wisdom.
Colonization of mars is a dumb idea with anything like current technology because of the radiation. The moon is a much better candidate for colonization. Be that as it may, your point is entirely correct and contradicts many conservative ideas about Singapore. Great to visit but I don’t want to live there. Like slavery, immigration is a short term solution that will cause many long term problems; if I may mix metaphors we should have picked our own damn cotton and the Indian immigrants aren’t all that smart or hard working anyway. Good video on this topic: https://odysee.com/@Freemanbeyondthewall:d/1153:1?r=DRQZ6SKn7GHx5HiN25DQZm7y3WwHto9p
yeah Singapore worship by the right wing is retarded. LKY was...ok by postwar standards, but Singapore today is a boring, distressingly sterile, overpriced cultural desert.
The food is good and not super cheap but it’s affordable, and I trust it more than restaurants in Thailand or Kuala Lumpur. accommodations are damn expensive, ended up with a hostel where you sleep in a pod 😂
A mark of failure, these days perversely regarded as a 'metric' of success by exponents of the dismal science (ok there's not much land in Singapore but still...)
Yeah food there is pretty good and not too dear. Indians have been semi-civilised and kept under reasonable control. Can't think of much else to recommend it than the charm of 'Singlish' and a general sense of...safety. It's not *that* bad but for sure its no miracle either.
I was in a coach a month ago,3 hour drive from London to home. The two lady passengers in the seat in front of me,they didn't know each other but got chatting and found they had both lived in Singapore a number of years (with husband and children). They loved it. They were both saying how fabulous it was. They did both agree that being European (British),white and affluent went a long way in that,and they had noticed it wasnt SO cushy for the locals but they didn't make the rules.
I think our entire society is an IQ shredder, in that a comfortable middle class lifestyle is only achievable for most people with two working spouses, two commutes and children in daycare. The financial stresses on parents for education, activities and real estate are also massive shredders. Finally the years spent on tertiary education and debts incurred are one final deterrent to reproduction.
I also find that there is one sweet spot where well- educated males can have children. The requirements seem to be six-figure non-elite professional work that allows for some presence at home, keeps commutes reasonable and also allows the mom to stop work for at least a few years. The problem is that even this model seems to top out at three kids, it doesn’t work as well for professional women and it requires a certain type of male to pull this off. But that is the model we would have to look at to encourage more mid-sized families.
It’s interesting to see my family basically described in your comment, lol. But yes, we do have an extremely specific structure that allows my husband to work from home for a nonprofit, and me to be home full time. He has a high salary but can probably triple his salary if he works in Silicon Valley for FAANG or X (he is certainly talented enough). But those companies require him to be on site and he would never want that. Instead, he is working for a nonprofit that allows him to be full remote, and be a present and influential father to our children.
His situation is not easily generalizable for other men, unfortunately. As Liam Neesom would say, “I have a certain set of skills”, and a certain set of circumstances, that made all of this possible.
Sadly in UK we've already got them. They hang around our shopping streets in sullen looking groups talking East European,seemingly with no purpose, and all look like axe murderers,which some of their grandfathers probably were..." so what did you do in WW2 Granddad?"....
I don’t want to cast aspersions on another man’s family but some of the decisions he has made in that regard are bonkers. I hope his kids turn out okay
As a follower of Musk’s projects I think you’re missing some of the nuance of his Mars plans. His stated goal isn’t to “populate” or “conquer” mars as you state, which would require populations we don’t have even for here on earth. His goal is to develop the capability to use mars as a backup plan if an extinction level event hit the earth. And that’s not a bad ace to have up one’s sleeve. Populating mars can happen if people want to go there and do that but I don’t think there’s any risk of that given our fertility levels.
There is a tendency in humans to focus on their own lives (from a meta perspective > short term).
„I want to be rich when I'm retired“ instead of „I will lay the foundation so my grandkids will prosper for the future to come.“
It reasonable of course, as they will not have control over the material world anymore when their days are counted.
But when there are projects and goals that are too big for one’s life, even when the subjects are aware of this, they often fail to understand that some things are outside the scope of our lives.
I see this pattern often and Elon is a prime example.
We seem quite sure in the goodness of the lives we lead and yet not quite proud enough to breed like rabbits and to ensure that this mindset would dominate. Viewed from the outside it surely looks like selfish nihilism, a last ditch grab at hedonism before the grave, rather than a positive belief system that you want your descendants to inherit.
This topic reminds me of Isaac Asimov's short story, "The Last Question," a remarkable piece for covering the greatest time span of any short story ever. Via specific vignettes, the reader follows humanity through the Kardashev scale of expansion until the ultimate cosmic expansion is reached (Kardashevmaxx?) at which point we are united into a single disembodied Mind floating out there in the aether. The basic assumption of the story, of course, is that people will be wedding and bedding each other enough to make such a Kardashevian future possible. Storytelling usually requires such precarious assumptions to be interesting, so I don't count it against Asimov, but things looked very different back in the 50's when people were still making productive use of their squishy bits. There was a rich humanism in early sci-fi, but our reality is more cyberpunk.
They take a very admiring attitude toward what Musk pulled off with his company (when you look at (1) all the failed attempts to make rockets profitable before SpaceX came along and (2) the immense amount of ingenuity and hard work that went into SpaceX, it's hard not to.)
But of course the stuff about 80-90 hour workweeks is true. People sleeping at the office/factory and then waking up to Metallica blasting through the speakers at 1:00 am over and over and over. At one point they describe a SpaceX worksite as "like some obscure area of Hell that Dante forgot to mention."
And yet it seems too pessimistic to say outright that companies like that (whose employees usually don't work there their whole lives - reward them well enough and at some point they'll as often as not decide to cash out and move on to something else) can only exist in an "IQ shredder" community. After all it seems to me that Britain did something similar with the East India Company during its zenith - young men in their late teens or early twenties would put their family/social lives on hold, sail to the other side of the world, and work grindingly hard to make a fortune as soldiers or lawyers or merchants or whatever the Empire needed at the moment, and then ten or fifteen or twenty years later they'd come back, buy a fancy house, marry, and have lots of kids.
So it's definitely possible to have a culture where it's expected that the young strivers, once they're comfortably rich and don't have the energy to keep on striving like they used to, will settle down, marry women half their age, and breed more highly motivated, high-IQ people like themselves. But the question is: what do you have to do to rebuild that culture?
I think the question of how to rebuild the culture is the heart of the matter. Art, architecture, literature and music for the ages were funded and created by those with a view to the difference between earthly and eternal time along with a willingness to sacrifice for both future generations and a heavenly reward. Hope remains for a Peaceable Kingdom before time ends and eternity begins…if you believe ;)
Care to share where you’re migrating to? I’ve found I rather prefer the animal predators of a western rural location to the civilized ones in the big and small cities I grew up in & then raised my children in but then, I’ve had the luxury & benefits of a spouse who’s ancestors had long term visions with strong work ethics and he isn’t afraid to do the same…all coupled with high intelligence. My people were poor, but also smart and hard working. After 50 years together I can already see our almost adult grandchildren will follow the same path. This is wealth and it’s not just about money. Those who work for us have found the same and there lies wisdom. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. A gift of freedom and grace available to all. God mostly asks that we not do harm…and love our neighbors. Again, not easy, but simple.
You can’t have sustainable eugenics without high fertility amongst the middle to upper middle class. Even if the musks of the world have 12 kids, it’s just not enough to offset the much larger population around the same skill level halving each generation.
Musks model works at a personal level in the sense that being uber rich means he can afford all the houses, Nannies, surrogates, and divorce settlements necessary to have a lot of kids that way. But that obviously isn’t scalable to his employees, all of whom would be in the gutter following his lifestyle because they don’t have infinity bucks.
It’s notable to me that Musk was in a moment where if fertility was important to him he could have made it a to legislative priority and probably gotten something meaningful done.
Instead he frittered around with this DOGE thing which didn’t seem to have a plan and he got bored with.
Then he decided to light all his political capital on fire to….try to get more not all that productive Indians. Canada, UK, and AZ went all in on infinity Indians and all it got them was a stagnant to falling gdp per capita and no innovations I can see.
Musk is a talented guy and certainly is changing the world, but I don’t trust him based upon the way he lives his personal life. You can’t remake nature into what you want it to be. It just is.
Yeah
Musk is a zero-talent hack. Even PayPal had to ditch his codebase when they acquired X in the late 90s.
Ah, corporate indoctrination. That's why the CEOs aren't fans of remote work for their employees. Plus remote workers are actually able to have a life outside of the corporate realm.
I actually enjoy being in the office and interacting with real people all day... it's just that living anywhere close to an office is a bit of a nightmare these days
I have a feeling these tech billionaires are going to have a second epiphany later in life. Right now they collectively realized a Democrat regime is suicidal, by retirement they'll realize a Republican regime is a slower version of the same, and 'then' Musk and his ilk will look at what your next article suggests.
As smart as they claim and appear to be they seemingly lack wisdom.
"As smart as they claim and appear to be they seemingly lack wisdom." - many such cases, alas
Colonization of mars is a dumb idea with anything like current technology because of the radiation. The moon is a much better candidate for colonization. Be that as it may, your point is entirely correct and contradicts many conservative ideas about Singapore. Great to visit but I don’t want to live there. Like slavery, immigration is a short term solution that will cause many long term problems; if I may mix metaphors we should have picked our own damn cotton and the Indian immigrants aren’t all that smart or hard working anyway. Good video on this topic: https://odysee.com/@Freemanbeyondthewall:d/1153:1?r=DRQZ6SKn7GHx5HiN25DQZm7y3WwHto9p
yeah Singapore worship by the right wing is retarded. LKY was...ok by postwar standards, but Singapore today is a boring, distressingly sterile, overpriced cultural desert.
The food is good and not super cheap but it’s affordable, and I trust it more than restaurants in Thailand or Kuala Lumpur. accommodations are damn expensive, ended up with a hostel where you sleep in a pod 😂
'accommodations are damn expensive'
A mark of failure, these days perversely regarded as a 'metric' of success by exponents of the dismal science (ok there's not much land in Singapore but still...)
Yeah food there is pretty good and not too dear. Indians have been semi-civilised and kept under reasonable control. Can't think of much else to recommend it than the charm of 'Singlish' and a general sense of...safety. It's not *that* bad but for sure its no miracle either.
I was in a coach a month ago,3 hour drive from London to home. The two lady passengers in the seat in front of me,they didn't know each other but got chatting and found they had both lived in Singapore a number of years (with husband and children). They loved it. They were both saying how fabulous it was. They did both agree that being European (British),white and affluent went a long way in that,and they had noticed it wasnt SO cushy for the locals but they didn't make the rules.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids,it's cold as hell,and there's no one there to raise them ,if you did.
Tell NASA a 1970s songwriter+ musician already got it right first time.
I think our entire society is an IQ shredder, in that a comfortable middle class lifestyle is only achievable for most people with two working spouses, two commutes and children in daycare. The financial stresses on parents for education, activities and real estate are also massive shredders. Finally the years spent on tertiary education and debts incurred are one final deterrent to reproduction.
I also find that there is one sweet spot where well- educated males can have children. The requirements seem to be six-figure non-elite professional work that allows for some presence at home, keeps commutes reasonable and also allows the mom to stop work for at least a few years. The problem is that even this model seems to top out at three kids, it doesn’t work as well for professional women and it requires a certain type of male to pull this off. But that is the model we would have to look at to encourage more mid-sized families.
Excellently put.
It’s interesting to see my family basically described in your comment, lol. But yes, we do have an extremely specific structure that allows my husband to work from home for a nonprofit, and me to be home full time. He has a high salary but can probably triple his salary if he works in Silicon Valley for FAANG or X (he is certainly talented enough). But those companies require him to be on site and he would never want that. Instead, he is working for a nonprofit that allows him to be full remote, and be a present and influential father to our children.
His situation is not easily generalizable for other men, unfortunately. As Liam Neesom would say, “I have a certain set of skills”, and a certain set of circumstances, that made all of this possible.
Do we want to cultivate Western Renaissance Men or do we want to churn out masses of bugpeople?
Quality over quantity
Sadly in UK we've already got them. They hang around our shopping streets in sullen looking groups talking East European,seemingly with no purpose, and all look like axe murderers,which some of their grandfathers probably were..." so what did you do in WW2 Granddad?"....
I believe the preferred nomenclature is 'milling around'
https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1638273001765457939
How do Elon's nine children fit in to this?
Happy New Year, as well. This 'Stack is one of my favorites.
I don’t want to cast aspersions on another man’s family but some of the decisions he has made in that regard are bonkers. I hope his kids turn out okay
Have you ever seen Elon Musks mother? If you have,it explains EVERYTHING. They walk among us and we know them not.
And Happy New Year!
Great wealth is an exempter.
I’m enjoying this series you’re doing.
As a follower of Musk’s projects I think you’re missing some of the nuance of his Mars plans. His stated goal isn’t to “populate” or “conquer” mars as you state, which would require populations we don’t have even for here on earth. His goal is to develop the capability to use mars as a backup plan if an extinction level event hit the earth. And that’s not a bad ace to have up one’s sleeve. Populating mars can happen if people want to go there and do that but I don’t think there’s any risk of that given our fertility levels.
Happy New Year! Today I saw a video of Sam Hyde offering his 2 cents on the issue. Worth watching if you can get through his wit.
I saw it and greatly enjoyed.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
I been sayin this
oh jolly good then
There is a tendency in humans to focus on their own lives (from a meta perspective > short term).
„I want to be rich when I'm retired“ instead of „I will lay the foundation so my grandkids will prosper for the future to come.“
It reasonable of course, as they will not have control over the material world anymore when their days are counted.
But when there are projects and goals that are too big for one’s life, even when the subjects are aware of this, they often fail to understand that some things are outside the scope of our lives.
I see this pattern often and Elon is a prime example.
We seem quite sure in the goodness of the lives we lead and yet not quite proud enough to breed like rabbits and to ensure that this mindset would dominate. Viewed from the outside it surely looks like selfish nihilism, a last ditch grab at hedonism before the grave, rather than a positive belief system that you want your descendants to inherit.
This topic reminds me of Isaac Asimov's short story, "The Last Question," a remarkable piece for covering the greatest time span of any short story ever. Via specific vignettes, the reader follows humanity through the Kardashev scale of expansion until the ultimate cosmic expansion is reached (Kardashevmaxx?) at which point we are united into a single disembodied Mind floating out there in the aether. The basic assumption of the story, of course, is that people will be wedding and bedding each other enough to make such a Kardashevian future possible. Storytelling usually requires such precarious assumptions to be interesting, so I don't count it against Asimov, but things looked very different back in the 50's when people were still making productive use of their squishy bits. There was a rich humanism in early sci-fi, but our reality is more cyberpunk.
My first thoughts on reading this are that you're probably right.
Oddly, right after I finished your piece I checked the Psmith book review blog and saw that their latest review is of a history of SpaceX:
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger
They take a very admiring attitude toward what Musk pulled off with his company (when you look at (1) all the failed attempts to make rockets profitable before SpaceX came along and (2) the immense amount of ingenuity and hard work that went into SpaceX, it's hard not to.)
But of course the stuff about 80-90 hour workweeks is true. People sleeping at the office/factory and then waking up to Metallica blasting through the speakers at 1:00 am over and over and over. At one point they describe a SpaceX worksite as "like some obscure area of Hell that Dante forgot to mention."
And yet it seems too pessimistic to say outright that companies like that (whose employees usually don't work there their whole lives - reward them well enough and at some point they'll as often as not decide to cash out and move on to something else) can only exist in an "IQ shredder" community. After all it seems to me that Britain did something similar with the East India Company during its zenith - young men in their late teens or early twenties would put their family/social lives on hold, sail to the other side of the world, and work grindingly hard to make a fortune as soldiers or lawyers or merchants or whatever the Empire needed at the moment, and then ten or fifteen or twenty years later they'd come back, buy a fancy house, marry, and have lots of kids.
So it's definitely possible to have a culture where it's expected that the young strivers, once they're comfortably rich and don't have the energy to keep on striving like they used to, will settle down, marry women half their age, and breed more highly motivated, high-IQ people like themselves. But the question is: what do you have to do to rebuild that culture?
I think the question of how to rebuild the culture is the heart of the matter. Art, architecture, literature and music for the ages were funded and created by those with a view to the difference between earthly and eternal time along with a willingness to sacrifice for both future generations and a heavenly reward. Hope remains for a Peaceable Kingdom before time ends and eternity begins…if you believe ;)
Those men were marrying younger women, who were themselves not working 80 hour weeks.
They also started their careers at like 15, such that twenty years adventuring still left them like 35.
That type of culture will build itself naturally. Just need to remove the 5% parasitic society which claims itself our betters while self destructing.
In between telecommuting and moving people to expensive tech hubs, there are:
* The smallish liveable city company town model.
* Multiple small town satellite offices.
Quite so. I'm in the process of replanning my own life to follow this model. Moving soon
Care to share where you’re migrating to? I’ve found I rather prefer the animal predators of a western rural location to the civilized ones in the big and small cities I grew up in & then raised my children in but then, I’ve had the luxury & benefits of a spouse who’s ancestors had long term visions with strong work ethics and he isn’t afraid to do the same…all coupled with high intelligence. My people were poor, but also smart and hard working. After 50 years together I can already see our almost adult grandchildren will follow the same path. This is wealth and it’s not just about money. Those who work for us have found the same and there lies wisdom. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. A gift of freedom and grace available to all. God mostly asks that we not do harm…and love our neighbors. Again, not easy, but simple.
Looking forward to the next instalment!
Thanks Alex
You can’t have sustainable eugenics without high fertility amongst the middle to upper middle class. Even if the musks of the world have 12 kids, it’s just not enough to offset the much larger population around the same skill level halving each generation.
Musks model works at a personal level in the sense that being uber rich means he can afford all the houses, Nannies, surrogates, and divorce settlements necessary to have a lot of kids that way. But that obviously isn’t scalable to his employees, all of whom would be in the gutter following his lifestyle because they don’t have infinity bucks.
It’s notable to me that Musk was in a moment where if fertility was important to him he could have made it a to legislative priority and probably gotten something meaningful done.
Instead he frittered around with this DOGE thing which didn’t seem to have a plan and he got bored with.
Then he decided to light all his political capital on fire to….try to get more not all that productive Indians. Canada, UK, and AZ went all in on infinity Indians and all it got them was a stagnant to falling gdp per capita and no innovations I can see.
I think a big part of the problem is that there's no consensus political action which would raise the birthrates