The Elon Musk BS about indentured servitude on Mars, this was bothering me the other day before I read that quote and I didn’t tweet about it, but yeah I have thoughts about capitalists planning to “save humanity” by leaving earth...

The idea that it is somehow an easier feat of engineering to leave our planet and terraform another planet, than it is to fight climate change on Earth is a load of horseshit. So why is it billed that way? Why convince people that space travel is “our only hope as a species”?
When I played Horizon Zero Dawn, one thing that really, really upset me was the quest where you discover the classrooms intended to educate future humans, and there is a Faro logo on *everything*.

It’s not about saving humanity, it’s about being acknowledged as a “saviour”
You can’t save “humanity” by fleeing the Earth, leaving billions to die and the biosphere to collapse. And you can’t create a utopian society elsewhere by exporting the same sociocultural mindset and capitalist ideology that destroyed our planet, you can only delay the inevitable
It’s one big fucking vanity project entirely devoid of merit, and a society with a literal saviour is not going to be one where shit like equality is possible. Without dissenters, it’s going to be a perfect distillation of everything already wrong with our present society
If Bezos and Musk really cared about saving humanity, they dump their fortunes into reversing climate change and lobbying for regulations, but of course they aren’t, that would actually help people. All they want is a lifeboat, as if they as individuals are stand-ins for humanity
They’re spending billions on a barely feasible dream and salivating at the thought of leaving this rock for their own private Raptures, complete with indentured servitude. Like locust, they’re just content to use up everything they can and be on their merry way.
It’s a tremendous waste of ill-gotten resources. Those two could be using their resources to save billions of lives, but instead plan to replicate the capitalist exploitation killing our planet on another one, and nobody takes them to task for the fucking selfish cruelty of it
Journalists report on it with starry eyed breathlessness, as if it’s eccentric idealism—it’s not, it’s egocentrism on a massive scale. They’d rather let you die and start an empire on mars before they’d pay their taxes to improve life materially for the billions on Earth

More from Tech

The 12 most important pieces of information and concepts I wish I knew about equity, as a software engineer.

A thread.

1. Equity is something Big Tech and high-growth companies award to software engineers at all levels. The more senior you are, the bigger the ratio can be:


2. Vesting, cliffs, refreshers, and sign-on clawbacks.

If you get awarded equity, you'll want to understand vesting and cliffs. A 1-year cliff is pretty common in most places that award equity.

Read more in this blog post I wrote:
https://t.co/WxQ9pQh2mY


3. Stock options / ESOPs.

The most common form of equity compensation at early-stage startups that are high-growth.

And there are *so* many pitfalls you'll want to be aware of. You need to do your research on this: I can't do justice in a tweet.

https://t.co/cudLn3ngqi


4. RSUs (Restricted Stock Units)

A common form of equity compensation for publicly traded companies and Big Tech. One of the easier types of equity to understand: https://t.co/a5xU1H9IHP

5. Double-trigger RSUs. Typically RSUs for pre-IPO companies. I got these at Uber.


6. ESPP: a (typically) amazing employee perk at publicly traded companies. There's always risk, but this plan can typically offer good upsides.

7. Phantom shares. An interesting setup similar to RSUs... but you don't own stocks. Not frequent, but e.g. Adyen goes with this plan.

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