Sway

Elon’s statements are the verbal equivalent of getting drunk and vomitting on a wall. Stuff comes up that you never expected to see, it creates a huge mess, and whatever sticks, sticks.

When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.

In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

Edit: spelling.

I’ll assume that by normal, we’re referring to him not being wealthy. In that regard, I’d disagree. I think he’s a real narcissist, and even if he didn’t have all his wealth he’d still have similar issues, just on a much smaller scale. He wouldn’t have the large audience he currently enjoys, nor all the attention he gets without his money.

In other words, without his money we would just view him as another kook espousing whatever idea he happens to find interesting that day.

Oh same note too! If you dare start doing something before you’ve gotten those bags ok’d, or if you plunk down a bag before it prompts you to do so it’s like you’re committing a felony.

I would’ve but I had just spent an hour getting a cart full of groceries and I wasn’t about to go do that again somewhere else. Plus I couldn’t imagine, at the time, they’d be gone that long.

Even worse, here in Canada at the Sobeys owned stores, you can opt to use your own reusable bag (plastic grocery bags are now outlawed) but if you do they prompt an employee to come check your bags. They never actually check, but if there isn’t an attendant around you just have to wait there until they notice and end the prompt. I waited for 10 minutes the other day because the employee went off for a break or something.

Edit: spelling