Heinleinian

I'm amazed there could be negative reaction to this. Just think of it this way: every year there are literally armies of smart young people, who are fully capable of being top-notch programmers or engineers, who graduate and become lawyers or go to wall street. Many of them spend their time on things that add _negative value_ for the economy. Every single one of those people who goes into engineering is an entire career that helps the US economy instead of hurting it.

(Note: if you like, read "western capitalist democracy economies" instead of "US economy").

Funny, I thought the place to be right now would be "boycott Facebook". Where can I go to find that?

Of course. Work with any government bureaucracy and you'll notice it pretty quickly. Entire divisions can be filled with good, bright, well-meaning people, yet that division can still churn out crap work product. How is that? An organization's culture and the way incentives are aligned can quickly override any pockets of talented individuals.

Anyone else find it odd that the day the facebook email change scandal broke, they announced Sandberg was their first ever female on the board? Really looked like they had a distraction press release in the pipeline for exactly this scenario, and they popped the top as soon as there was backlash.

There's another key here: both those industries were calcified with few innovators, so they had large latent pools of super-talented people that had been previously under-utilized.

By offering a compelling vision, Elon has sucked up much of the top talent in the space industry who had just been waiting for someone to come along with an uber-cool program for them to work on. His vision is so cool, in fact, that they are willing to work for much lower wages than they would make at a big defense contractor.

Similarly with Tesla, there was a large pool of talented engineers who are passionate about electric cars, who had just been waiting for the right company to come along and rescue them from dead-end projects at the big car companies.

If you have a source for this I'd love to see it. The only unethical behavior I've seen at a major publication was at the WSJ, and there it wasn't payola. They have writers who blatantly distort the facts, manufacture quotes, and screw people by "forgetting" that something was off the record if it fits their spin.

Only thing I can think of that comes close is some of the trade press for industries that are dominated by a few big players. Trade press often are getting a huge percentage of their print ad revenues (and sponsorship dollars for conferences) from one or two companies, and will bend over backwards to avoid criticizing them. They'll also do slam pieces on upstart companies. But there's no explicit agreement going on, they just know where their bread is buttered.