Elon Musk’s wealth is listed as about $337,000,000,000. If you earn $50K per year it would take you 6.74 million years to earn it, or 3.37 million years at $100K. If you earned a million dollars a year it would still take you 337,000 years. It’s an obscene amount of wealth to belong to one man.

The thing is, this care helps kids with gender dysphoria to get through their teenage years and make it to adulthood. It can’t simply be postponed until later without serious impact on the well being of the kid. We are talking about things like puberty blockers here, not surgeries:

Major medical associations agree that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria, which, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is psychological distress that may result when a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth do not align.

Though the care is highly individualized, some children may decide to use reversible puberty suppression therapy. This part of the process may also include hormone therapy that can lead to gender-affirming physical change. Surgical interventions, however, are not typically done on children and many health care providers do not offer them to minors. (CNN)

Gender dysphoria is by all accounts a deeply troubling experience during teenage years, particularly if your body is growing in a direction that makes you ever more uncomfortable. Puberty blockers can help:

For transgender and gender-diverse youth who have gender dysphoria, delaying puberty might:

• Improve mental well-being.
• Ease depression and anxiety.
• Improve social interactions with others.
• Lower the need for future surgeries.
• Ease thoughts or actions of self-harm. (Mayo Clinic)

You can’t do this once you’re already an adult, and there are physical changes you might be deeply uncomfortable with that can be locked in by puberty and will now require more radical interventions as an adult. I know trans adults who really struggle with the feeling that they should have started medical treatments sooner, before puberty brought changes to their bodies.

These treatments aren’t prescribed lightly either, contrary to what some right-wing voices would have you imagine. From the same Mayo Clinic page:

In most cases, to begin using puberty blockers, an individual needs to:

• Show a lasting pattern of gender nonconformity or gender dysphoria.
• Have gender dysphoria that began or worsened at the start of puberty.
• Address any psychological, medical or social problems that could interfere with the treatment.
• Be able to understand the treatment and agree to have it. This is called informed consent.

Puberty blockers are not recommended for children who have not started puberty.

Maybe now they can forget all the expensive chipmaking and get back to their core business of stock buybacks.

These things are helpful:

https://www.amazon.com/DEWENWILS-Extension-Weatherproof-Outdoor-Grounded/dp/B0891TSBXC

Can’t genocide an entire population if decent people keep helping them. Israel’s logic is brutal.

Coming from Windows I miss the excitement and suspense of never knowing whether my click on an icon actually got noticed by the OS. And the thrill of never knowing exactly which icon you clicked on because the UI is so slow to draw and redraw itself that the icons move unexpectedly while you’re aiming. Oh, and the unpredictable surprise of focus stealing.

Does anyone care what this guy says about anything? He is in the news every week with his more or less obnoxious opinions about random stuff. Can we just ignore him?

Just another rich nobody who’s desperate to buy people’s attention.

It’s The Mirror reporting on The Daily Mail, so it has been through two rounds of incoherent tabloid garbling. We can’t really know what to make of it unless we can find a better source for Musk’s family history. This particular claim about when and why his grandparents moved to South Africa isn’t in the Mail interview and The Mirror doesn’t name a source for it except “a separate interview.”

However, we can be fairly certain that Elon and his dad are both nasty pieces of work:

‘Elon thinks woke is a joke. He’s said it’s got to end. I forget his exact words, but he’s starting a war on woke. He says woke has taken his oldest son from him.’

He’s referring to Elon’s trans daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, who he’s said on ‘X’ has been ‘killed by the woke mind virus’.

Edit: Turns out Musk’s maternal grandparents moved to South Africa in 1950, not the early 1900s:

Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather

Archive: https://archive.is/x3OYY

Check out Errol Musk’s relationship with his own stepdaughter. He has fathered two children with her.

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3188639/completely-normal-errol-musk-dating-his-stepdaughter-jana

His father is being quite explicit that he thinks Nazism is Elon Musk’s true heritage.

Isn’t it a bit anachronistic to talk about Nazism in the 1900s? There were precursor German nationalist movements then, but the name “Nazism” is from later. That said, it sounds like Musk’s family were ready to embrace it good and early.

Edit: Maybe that date is a misprint? Musk’s mother was born in 1948. If her parents decided to move to South Africa in the 1900s for political reasons they’d have to have been adults then, which would make them implausibly old parents. Or maybe “early 1900s” is being used to mean “first half of the 20th century”?

Another edit: It seems that the maternal grandparents moved to South Africa in 1950, not the early 1900s. So it had nothing to do with Nazism per se, but quite a lot to do with thinking like Nazis:

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to possess his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming the national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.

Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather

Archive link: https://archive.is/x3OYY

Yes, I agree that journalism can’t be unbiased and that honesty and integrity would go a long way. it would also be nice if journalists actually tried to help people understand complex issues rather than just reporting in the shallowest possible way to get a knee-jerk reaction from the audience.

What would neutrality be? An equal representation of views from all positions, including those people consider “extreme”? A representation that focuses on centrism, to which many are opposed? Or a conservative’s idea of neutrality where there’s “normal” and there’s “political” and normal just happens to be conservative? Even picking an interpretation of “neutral” is a political choice which will be opposed by someone somewhere, so they could claim you’re not being neutral towards them. I don’t know that we even have a very clear idea of what “unbiased” would be. This is not to deny that there are some ways of presenting information that are obviously biased and others that are less so. But this expectation that we can find a position or a presentation that is simply unbiased may not even make much sense.

Appoint her to the cabinet, you say?

I didn’t know about that.

https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/essays-and-articles/measles-a-dangerous-illness/

Also all the rest of us. People all around the world will suffer the consequences of Trump voters’ ignorance. An unvaccinated USA will be a huge pool in which any pandemic virus can linger and mutate.

Bird flu can spread to humans through the air. From the CDC:

What Causes Bird Flu Virus Infections in Humans

I don’t know about mosquitoes. I haven’t heard that they’re a major concern for this virus.

Russia already has their man in place ready to undermine NATO fatally from within, starting on January 20th.

The CDC has been involved in genetically sequencing strains of the virus and working on vaccine development, in exactly the kind of preparedness we need for a very deadly virus that could go pandemic at any time. RFK has promised to end vaccination programs and force vaccines off the market, and he’s about to be put in charge of the CDC. The whole world will be worse prepared for a bird flu pandemic thanks to his wacky antivax views, and many, many people will die in the USA and elsewhere as a result. This is a virus that by some measures has a fatality rate of 51%, whereas COVID was probably somewhere between 1% and 2%.