There are ways to offset the feed costs by growing your own feed or tapping into waste streams like food/produce scraps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796948 (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622767 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025852 (2016)
I would also argue he is not being singled out, here are some comments posted criticizing Steve Jobs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28295688https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5578642
It really shouldn't come as a surprise that notable people related to a company or project are brought up when an article about it appears on HN.
This sort of blindness is a major reason liberals can't properly respond to the rise of MAGA or Trumpism. They refuse to understand it. Understanding something doesn't mean you agree. You can't properly criticize something you don't understand, nor can you provide an alternative that answers it.
Go back in time to the 1990s and 2000s.
The shuttle program was winding down. The only way to get humans into space currently on the market was the Russian Soyuz program, which is ancient Soviet technology. The only human habitation in space was the ISS, which everyone knows is a good engineering experimental platform but otherwise a dead end. The DC-X (first vertical landing rocket) was cancelled. The Venturestar was cancelled, and it may not have been a good design anyway for several reasons.
A lot of people are writing about this as the end of the space age, that the whole thing wasn't a good idea to begin with and there is no future there.
Then along comes SpaceX and within a few years they go from small orbital rocket to functional first stages that land themselves and now they almost have a fully reusable super-heavy capable of refueling in orbit.
Now look at cars. Common wisdom in the 1990s and 2000s is that affordable long-range cars are impossible without fossil fuels. There's a popular site called The Oil Drum that pushes the narrative that all motorized transport will end if fossil fuels are depleted. There are hybrids, but they still run on gas, and nothing much has happened to ICE technology since fuel injection in the early 1980s.
There are some EV efforts but they're early and half-assed.
Then along comes Tesla with the roadster and shows that EVs can be not just viable but cool and actually faster with better torque and acceleration than conventional cars. Since then many other car companies have caught up, but I still believe the whole industry would not have moved without Tesla kicking them in the arse.
If you really hate Musk, the question you should be asking is: why does the human race seem to need people like this to advance?
We had the technology to build the Falcon 9 and Starship in the 1990s, maybe even the 1980s. The problem wasn't money. The total cost of Falcon 9 development was comparable to two space shuttle launches.
The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.
It really does seem like nothing big happens in human history without some manic unhinged asshole pushing it. We have everything -- ability, intelligence, technology, money -- but we don't do it without one of these people. Why?
Maybe we'd need "visionary" CEOs less if we had an over the counter amphetamine-like drug but with less addictiveness or other side effects.
In my view, Elon's spent most of his good will reputation capital. Of course, we still do have the super-fans who are willing to look past his petulant behavior and give him a pass for his bone-head business moves.
The other take is that he's a genius and a hostile takeover of Twitter was just a checkpoint on the way to making US government his puppet state. Congress is twiddling their thumbs while Musk is apparently preparing to siphon off taxpayer dollars into Space X, Tesla or other ventures.
Either way, it's bad. I loathe the man and fear what could happen.
People hate it and there has been a big effort from activists to turn it over to public hands. The local politicians are on board for the most part, but the company is of course fighting tooth and nail.
Y Combinator is really showing an incredible lack of judgement in even thinking this was a good idea. SV bubble I guess?
TDS should not be tolerated in polite society.
Now I would love to see him fulfill his dream of being a Martian pioneer - as long as he doesn't return to earth. In my view, he is an embarrassment to the tech community and the United States. His childish and petty behavior has no place in a civil society.
My reason for starting a channel was to have a discussion around some of the projects I was working on that I found interesting. This never materialized. I never had a ton of engagement, but if I did most questions asked by viewers that are answered in the video.
I monetized my videos and started making beer-money amounts of revenue. I put more and more time into them but never gained traction. I had a few "evergreen" videos that would make maybe a thousand bucks a year, the rest of the videos hardly got any views at all.
Eventually, I found myself making videos to feed the algorithm not because it was a project that I wanted to do. This is where I had to stop. I realized that I just don't like editing videos.
My channel makes no revenue now because YouTube requires an upload schedule and shorts. Mr Beast's job sounds awful to me. The videos I make now only get dozens to hundreds of views when they're published. I mostly share them with friends and in online communities where the info contained might be helpful.
I've recently started learning card games that use a standard deck of playing cards and have been pleased with many of them. The advantage over trading card games is that it is MUCH cheaper and takes up a lot less space and it doesn't feel like I'm chasing an impossible goal.
I noticed he had a couple of packs of playing cards on his coffee table and upon closer inspection, I realized that each card in Uno maps to a card in 52 card deck. A standard Uno deck has 108 cards, which is a standard 52-card deck plus the jokers.
So we played Uno with his two decks of playing cards.