Hes the Swedish chef tho, not the Norwegian chef.

You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

This whole saga is like Trump found a cursed monkey’s paw and wished that the internet would believe he’s had sex with a consenting adult.

Honestly to me cough syrup tastes so incredibly bad as to be worse than the coughing. The cherry flavor has literally put me off of cherry flavored anything (except actual cherries) ever since childhood because it’s my mental default for “tastes like nasty medicine flavor” now.

Im not saying the stereotype of “conservative people living in trailer park style homes” isn’t classist, I’m suggesting that actively spreading it might not have been the objective of the OP, and that them doing so might have been more a case of not thinking through all the implications of what they were saying than an actual antipathy for people who live in cheap housing. I do realize its problematic even if so, I’ve spent a portion of my childhood in a place like that myself, I just felt a bit uneasy seeing some people here appear to assume the worse interpretation was the intended one when it still seemed ambiguous to me which it was, and that discomfort made me a bit defensive about it.

This may be a naivety of mine, but I struggle to communicate myself a lot and as a result I tend to look for the most benign intent that could lead to a given statement and assume that one until proven otherwise, because whenever I end up being the person phrasing something poorly or in a way that causes offense, it feels a lot easier to handle and address when people calmly point out what is wrong with it and why than when people jump on it as proof of a character flaw, and it’s very easy to project one’s own struggles and modes of thinking onto other people one runs across, I guess. I’m probably overthinking it all.

If one wanted a generous interpretation, it could be pointing out the irony in a poor person advocating for the interests of the rich that keep people like themselves in that position.

Elon took this literally.

That’s not what that seems to say at all. It doesn’t even look like it says “if we do nothing, we can’t grow these crops anymore”. It seems to be specifically about stratospheric aerosol injection (a specific geoengineering technique that we haven’t even committed to trying as yet), and suggests that if you use it to keep global temperatures stable, there can still be changes in where these crops can grow because changes to things like rainfall and humidity. I’ve not read the entire thing but from a glance at it’s conclusions, their simulations suggest that the crops would remain economically important to their growing regions under all their simulations, just with the viable amount that can be grown and the specific areas for doing it changed per region, and that using SAI to offset warming doesn’t simply result in the same yields as not having the warming would have the way one might otherwise expect.

It’s possible for platforms under the influence of the Chinese government and right wing American billionaires to both have harmful censorship.