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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Since this is a thread about Elon Musk, transportation infrastructure, public transportation, and urban design, and because HN has a sort of affinity for the Robert Moses story (The Power Broker was one of 'aaronsw's favorite books), this seems like a particularly on-point Twitter thread to read after the video:

https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832

You might not agree with all/any of it but I think it's hard to say this isn't thought-provoking.

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It's not thought provoking, it's a series of thought terminating cliches.

I'm as liberal as they come, I'm very sensitive to disguised racism, but the tweets' entire basis of comparison between Musk and Moses is "both are/were ambitious men and now musk is talking about infrastructure". It's free-association garbage.

The Moses story is fascinating because he accomplished great things that built NYC but was also a horrible person. The tweeter you linked is like, "hey, Musk is trying to accomplish great things, he must be just like Moses".

Moses wasn't a horrible person. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous, and effective person with a singular view --- one not totally out of step with the elite of his time --- that happened to be (in the opinion of many, including me) very harmful to the long-term health of New York.

I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.

That disagrees with the Twitter thread you linked to, which claims:

> Robert Moses weaponized Civil Engineering and Urban Planning to suppress marginalized communities. Engineering is always political.

Words like "weaponized" and "suppress" suggest that Emily thinks Moses was ill-intentioned, not merely an ambitious guy who in his monomania happened to overlook some of the more sinister side-effects of his work.

I don't entirely agree with the Twitter thread, but it's also possible to "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do. Overly-influential people exerting their power to harm others in the interest of what they believe to be "right" is something that bothers me a lot about the power structure of our industry today. I don't think the comparison is at all unwarranted.

> I don't entirely agree with the Twitter thread, but it's also possible to "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do.

Everyone thinks what they do is right. Ill-intentioned refers to whether the characterizer thinks it was right, not the actor.

it's also possible to "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do

How does that have anything to do with whether he was horrible? In general, people think they're doing the right thing. That doesn't mean they're not horrible.

In what ways, specifically, is Elon exerting his power to harm others? Or have I misunderstood your comments?

The entire point of The Power Broker is that Moses was ill-intentioned. He deliberately built his projects in ways that froze NYC's minorities out from being able to benefit from them, destroyed healthy neighborhoods when they tried to stop him, and bankrupted the city building highways it didn't need because every new highway project increased his personal political power.

I'm reading the biography of Moses as we speak and the current chapter does paint him as being capable of a unique kind of horribleness, regardless of his other positive qualities.

As one of his friends described him: "He's so forthright and honest that if he saw a man across the street who he thought was a son of a bitch, he would cross the street and call him a son of a bitch, lest by passing him in silence, his silence be misconstrued".

Let's not forget that Musk literally said he wants to bore tunnels because it takes him too long to get to work... and this video is essentially showcasing a rapid transit system for people who own his cars.

Musk also claimed Tesla's solar roof would cost less than a "normal" roof... (PS Musk considers a "normal" roof to be made of slate)

The "affordable" (his words) Model 3 has a standard configuration of about $40k.

I think he's a super interesting guy doing amazing things... but I think he's vastly out of touch with what concepts like "affordable" or "normal" mean to the majority of this country. His "normal" doesn't extend very far outside of silicon valley.

He's more Tony Stark than Iron Man.

The Model 3 starts at $35k [1], which is only slightly above the average price for a new car sold in the US ($34k) [2].

[1] https://www.tesla.com/model3 [2] http://mediaroom.kbb.com/2017-04-03-New-Car-Transaction-Pric...

I watched the roof reveal and Elon made it clear he was comparing to prices of high-end roofing material.

I suppose you could call it thought provoking, but the primary takeaway from that thread for me was to reaffirm why I don't follow many people on Twitter, and why I've grown very reluctant to patiently listen to privileged white people talk to me about the historical and contemporary oppression that people of my ancestry face in this country.

The whole thing comes off so self aggrandizing and baselessly accusatory.

In particular, I enjoyed this person's tweet[0] when challenged for some evidence of Musk's racism. Apparently, the rock solid evidence doesn't even have to do with tunnel boring, infrastructure, or urban planning, but instead with Musk not following any/enough women on Twitter. Truly revelatory stuff right here.

[0]https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858048505327366144

I found the thread interesting and informative up until she drew her conclusion:

Elon Musk doesn't strike me as an innovator when he talks about building tunnels and subways. He strikes me as Robert Moses. Who are these tunnels going to serve? The Latino communities in LA? Or are we just running them straight to the rich neighborhoods?

It's hard for me to believe someone doesn't have an axe to grind when they make statements like this. On what basis does this person claim that Elon Musk bears resemblance to Robert Moses?

This is my problem with many politics-in-tech discussions. People who take politics seriously say, "technology always has political implications." True enough; we do indeed seem to forget that. They stir some history into their argument. Even better. But once they have to perform analysis, free of the rigorous standards of thought you have in e.g. math or science, they start saying baseless things.

Yeah, that's also not the conclusion I would draw, either. And that's fine: I don't have to agree with the whole thread to get value out of it.

I don't see this as baseless to be honest. As someone in the camp of "technology always has political implications", one of the interesting trends I've seen with tech is that most of the benefits go to the rich first. In some ways yes, that makes sense. The problem is when they never transition to the whole population effectively. Take subways, a well-defined technology at this point. Pretty much every city you look at, there's a minority community without proper access because the city sees the cost as not worth it to build the additional line or pay for service. The Orange Line and Roxbury come to mind in Boston, who instead got a talked up bus system to replace a line moved out of a minority community.

When you see a technology like this and think of the benefits, considering who gets those benefits is a big part of the value of the idea practically. To me, it's nothing against the ideas technological merit, academic impressiveness, creative ingenuity, etc. It does reflect what ideas someone like Musk is focused on though, and I don't think bringing it up inherently means they have an axe to grind. I think Elon is doing a ton of good and is one of the few SV bigshots that deserves hype (looks sideways at Peter Thiel), but we should have realistic views on who his projects are exactly helping both short and long term.

I hear what you're saying and actually agree. The somewhat pedantic point I was making earlier was just that the author could've more conservatively written, "here are some possible dangers down this path which we should think carefully about."

(Sorry for replying to a long, substantive comment with a short one; I just don't have anything to add.)

The trick with this kind of thing is separating malicious deliberate exclusion from just trying to finance a project by catering to people who have money to fund it.

Sure it would be very nice and charitable of Musk to make sure that poorer communities are served by tunnels too, but that runs more risk of his already super risky business going bankrupt. In that case nobody, rich or poor, would benefit.

I imagine he'll follow a strategy similar to Tesla where he starts by pursuing the most wealthy markets while his costs are high and as the company refines its technique he'll go down market and become accessible to a broader swath of the population.

The Power Broker is one of my favorite books and I agree that Moses was ultimately a despicable man, who made NYC a much worse place to live to withholding funding for transit while pouring money into road building in a hopeless attempt to deal with the congestion he was causing.

However, I think the tweetstorm misses that it is poor and middle class people who are most hurt today by inadequate transit, and one thing that would have an enormous effect is an order of magnitude drop in tunneling costs.

My other post <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225045> links to a look at why the Second Avenue Subway's $2.2 B per km costs are 20x higher than other cities. A technology that drops tunnelling costs will be great for the poor, and thankfully, I do not believe the news media (with all of its flaws) would ever allow someone like Moses (or Musk) to operate the way he did today.

Very real risk for developing transport infrastructure... Would checks against this kind of malicious intent be on the digging company, or on the city planning departments that determine route alignments, etc.?

(Real question - I don't understand the relationship between technical contractors and cities in this context.)

Every self-driving car video I've seen is set in a place built for cars, not people. Not a coincidence.

This seems like a fairly average Five Minutes of Hate that Twitter users seem to produce all the time.

The only though it provokes in me is, Man, here we are a century later, and the ignorant masses are still letting rich white dudes decide their future for them.

"This white dude is a racist. Elon Musk is white! He must be planning to do the same imaginary thing!"

Not through-provoking; just more verbal diarrhea from a very angry, misguided individual that uses twitter as a platform to spread their dumb ideas.

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