We likely already have more than a 'thousands Mozarts,' but many lack the time or financial resources to express their talent, often working for minimum wage at disgusting companies like Amazon.
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That would increase the current population density from 41/sq mi to 5125. Are they willing to give up their vast estates to make room? Think those people will respect the gates to their estates and stay out?
Yes. If you see flowers growing through the cracks in the pavement, you don't make more pavement to get more cracks to get more flowers. You tear up the %$#@ing pavement.
*That's a punchy line to end a post on, but I actually mean that we break down institutions that perpetuate wealth inequality via the democratic process.
I get the feeling they're platforming the push for more people not because they want more "Mozarts" but because they need workers and they think the problem is there's not enough people when the actual problem is crap pay,unsafe work environments and 60 hour work weeks
I have to wonder how many Mozarts grew up in abject poverty in countries destabilized by countries like the US and will never even get to see a piano, or people who have no time to practice piano because they spend all their time in minimum wage jobs and app gigs.
If only someone could voluntarily raise the wages of his employees, and stop abusing law regarding contract employees to avoid the obligation to provide benefits to the folks living in their cars in his parking lots, and peeing into bottles to avoid penalties for "loss of productivity?"
So if Elon and Bezos et al stopped hoarding all the worlds wealth we could have at least a few Mozarts, Puccinis and thousands of Axl Roses. And that’s only in music.
The current world population is about 8 billion; in Mozart's time, it was just under 800 million. Right now 1.1 billion people live in acute poverty, and thus have little chance of achieving musical genius, or eating dinner tonight.
I know billionaires love "making things" but this once maybe we ought to solve the problems we've already created before increasing them by a factor of > 10 ....
And/or: School system doesn't have a music program for kids to learn instruments. Colleges drop "unproductive" majors. No municipal orchestras to give you a job while you're starting out.
I don't go to the question of talent here—I'm amazed and dumbfounded that these guys think the planet could handle another 992 billion people, even as a hypothetical.
We already have 1,000 would-be Mozarts who instead of learning music and honing their skills are doing shit jobs for shit wages. They're spending their time just surviving instead of blessing the rest of us with music we'd love.
What these would-be Mozarts need is unconditional basic income.
It is interesting how they picked Mozart: a talent who was manipulated and emotionally abused from a very young age by people far more powerful than he was, possibly leading to his premature death at 35.
Just read the short story "Caught in the Organ Draft" by Robert Silverberg. Now this news makes me think they want to bolster the population to harvest us for organs so they can live longer.
It is 2137; eighteen interlinked eyeballs float in a nutrient tank. Ten livers threaded together with gossamer filaments bob around them. Eight kidneys, held in reserve for the day of corporeal immanation, drift nearby. This is not human stew, this is Elon Musk, awaiting rebirth.
No! The only solution to the baby mashing machine is just to outbreed it! The baby mashing machine is non-negotiable! If we want Mozart's, we gotta feed the machine. That's just how it is for reasons unrelated to personal profit.
It takes a genius to wish bigger population when already large part of the existing population starves and many die of it everyday, we face global warming, in few decades we'll run out of agricultural soil and we are running out of such basic building material like sand.
Bezos and Musk looking for a bigger market...why? It's not like the bastards aren't already fat and pampered enough the greedy wasteful brainless **nts
The many Mozarts are at the mercy of those who have concentrated capital to such an extent that our media declares them savant instead of sociopathically greedy and insecure.
Was literally in a restroom at Disney World & thought I was listening to piped-in music & it was the cleaning person singing the Disney classics. Dsny needs janitorial help. They don’t need more ‘talent’. And that’s the sad reality of the entire world.
Yet more evidence that Jeff and Elon only think in terms of meritocracy and exceptionalism in order to justify value. They can’t fathom a world where they might have to part with their capital to foster others.
Of course they'll be talking about "thousands of Mozarts". What do you want them, to say they want thousands of thousands of slaves"? This wouldn't fly.
Exactly. If humanity would care more about the education and encouragement of all EXISTING children/grown-ups, we already (!) would have thousands of very gifted people to make the world a better place.
lol this unterstandig of humans as resources is so matrix like: If we squeeze out the millions there might be a surplus of Wunderkinder to feed our algorithms with another brillant ideas of how to squeeze humans more efficiently
One thousand Motzarts, but they're all forced to compete for attention and space within a single social media platform FartBarf where engagement is driven by loudest bodily function included in the audio work.
What they really want is so many desperate, hungry workers that they can always find someone to replace you with if you decide you don't want to tolerate corporate abuse for poverty wages any longer.
Yes, but how can you get a trillion Amazon Prime memberships without a trillion people? And just think of how overdraft fees that trillion people might pay while they buy a trillion Big Macs!
A trillion Humans would have a million Mozarts even if there was only one in a million.
Muskito has no sense of scale, or understanding how humans work
And so many more deranged over-resourced geriatric adolescents
exploiting them in ways that deprive us of talent and brilliance by widespread economic exploitation and pustulant corruption.
This is the waste of our current system. We could have artists, musicians, writers, programmers etc. Instead we have millions so exhausted from meaningless jobs that they only have leftover energy to watch social media and streaming services. We are serfs and slaves and we don't even realize it.
Stephen Jay Gould:
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
Reminds me of how I explain my approach to writing about ancient peoples. There would have been people just as capable and intelligent, but it's a matter of how that intelligence and potential was applied in their own time and culture.
Musk, Bezos and a lot of other tech bros are big fans of eugenics. When they ask for "more chldren" they ask for their weirdo and sack breeding problems where only rich, white and "smart" people should get children.
Bezos and Musk could personally fund art and music lessons in elementary schools all over the world if they really wanted Mozarts and not line workers. We're probably just not hungry enough yet to devote ourselves for $5 an hour.
That would be under 700 sq ft of habitable land/person, and that doesn't take into account land devoted to agriculture (demand for which won't decrease with a pop of 1 trillion) or land loss due to melting ice caps. Are they going to store us in skyscrapers like the Chinese pork factories?
Oh, I found the article... They intend to store us in space concentration camps. Still doesn't explain what they intend to do with us. Forced reproduction until they have as many Mozarts as they want?
That Gould quote about being less interested in the particulars of Einstein’s brain and more concerned with the certainty that equal intellects have almost certainly lived and died unrecognized in sweatshops.
I mean maybe it is, but the pool of potential Mozarts isn't just "humans", it's "humans who have their material needs met so they can focus on exploring their creative potential".
These d-bags believe they can statistically manufacture Mozarts. Meanwhile they hold all the means through which humanity could have better…everything, including education, which…wait for it…
…wait for it…
…could enhance and amplify musical talent I.e. manufacture Mozarts
“We are so self-assured of our own outlier status and innate, circumstance-unmediated superiority that all other humans must be the agar in a Petri dish” is just … SO blunt lmao
I propose that instead of wanting (probably white only) women to become breeding machines for wannabe feudal lords we remove a few thousand rich people from the face of the earth and reallocate their wealth into UBI. Should last us a while.
I'm sure there's nothing weird about the richest man in the world going to a political festival of a PM with a Mussolini obsession telling the attendees to have babies.
Yes yes... and an infinite number of monkeys would write Shakespeare. I'm pretty sure these guys have merely skimmed the Cliff's Notes of "how things work."
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
—Stephen Jay Gould
The other bit that folk seem to be missing with this one is how you shouldn't need to be Mozart levels of talent to justify your existence. Just being a person is enough, it doesn't matter how many of us there are.
do you think that the people who write violin concertos are billionaires? because as a person who writes concertos I can absolutely assure you that I am approximately one billion dollars away from that
Again I'm sorry. I think the asshats at the top of the biggest piles of money in the US are making a statement about how they want more peasants under them to make themselves feel important, and to speed up the money hoses fueling their interplanetary phallus measuring contest,...
...while also making backhanded statements about gender and modern music by holding up Mozart as a genius worth replicating when there have been hundreds of years of musical geniuses since.
I'm also bad at jokes. Again, I'm sorry you had to sit through this.
It's not about having mozarts right now. It's about increasingly the population so much that the "ratio" can remain the same but we get a larger total number.
As always, capitalists are only interested in a bigger pie if they can also have more of a percentage of the pie.
Well if that isn't just the height of misogyny I don't know what is. Congratulation Elon and Jeff, you just made women into nothing more than brood animals.
Yes, I even think he's half remembering being told something from Utopia or Oblivion by Buckminster Fuller. But Fuller was answering an objection to universal basic income by saying even if people were "unproductive", one in every million would have ideas to support us all.
Exactly.The answer is to nurture those that have the talent, whatever their background, not to go on some elitist population boom that the world is incapable of supporting. The potential Mozarts could be your next door neighbour right now.
Irony aside, it’s actually pretty well known that he dislikes music. So this is more of that weird performative human suit nonsense like when he had a speech prepared to pretend he felt the overview effect that time he was very nearly in space briefly.
OMG THIS! THIS! 👏 THIS! 👏 THIS! 👏
Parents do not have the money to invest in their children's future, and schools don't have the staff/resources to properly assist children into their passions. Why? Because of the wealthy elite.
Bezos plan: annual harvest of 1000 Mozart's, then cull the remaining population down, to responsibility manage for subsequent production. The law of probability farming.
I'm going to guess that Jeff "it's good actually when my employees break down crying from stress, it makes them work harder" bezos is not that interested in mozart
These billionaires are absurd and foolish and so limited. With a quadrillion people, we could have a million Mozarts! The most Mozarts ever. Highest Mozarts per capita even! Just a ridiculous number of Mozarts.
I'm surprised Ek haven't made an appearance alongside Bezos and Musk - "I told everyone long time ago - musicians should work harder. If anyone listened to me we would have many more Mozarts by now"
I'd argue we have closer 50,000 geniuses in every generation; art, music, math, science, philosophy, literature, etc., 99% of whom will be lost to a life of poverty, subsistence living and little education. Billionaires can/should be addressing global poverty, health, education & human rights.
Billionaires should not be doing anything with regard to public policy. Usually their attempts at addressing things like poverty are some crackpot libertarian nonsense.
Starving kids don't become Mozarts. This is the most cruel aspect of the supposedly human-friendly techbro billionaires: they don't actually care about non-white genius.
Yeah. Many women who are incredibly skilled and talented, who just don't do it cuz they are made to think it's not their "place". Thankfully seems to be that people are slowly getting tired of that BS and we are constantly seeing more people express themselves, in music and otherwise too
I'm reminded of Yuzuru Hanyu's older sister actually being the one in the family to start skating and quitting so that he could continue, but I'm not sure if she was considered more talented than he was.
There are still comp results floating around from when she competed (probably on skatingscores) and iirc she never made it really high especially the time before she stopped. But also ladies field is deeper than men’s so that doesn’t help.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
heck, even most privileged middle class capable but not genius level people are underemployed, let alone the many geniuses born into poverty who are guaranteed to be underemployed if they survive childhood
Just imagine the number of paid sycophants they must have to buffer them from the worldwide contempt this kind of stupidity invokes. Just mind boggling.
Dank Covid wird das nicht passieren. Eugenikprogramm läuft auf vollen Touren.
Covid schwächt außerdem die Zeugungsfähigkeit, so dass die Bevölkerung deutlich langsamer wachsen wird.
this is so... awe-inspiring to me because like... it's just... the logic fallacy here. how can fucking anyone believe these guys are not the biggest idiots ever oh my god?
How many of those Trillion would have adequate health care, or a safe place to live, or enough to eat, or the education and opportunities to develop their talent?
This is 100% correct. Decades ago I read an interview with Frank Zappa outlining the staggering amounts of time and money it takes to bring previously-unheard orchestral music into the world, and he came to the exact same conclusion.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
- Stephen Jay Gould
Strong agree. I haven't seen even a single Obnoxiously Over-large Laser being slowly moved towards a British Super spy with more than enough time for the both of them to talk about their feelings for each other...
Yeah, fuck them. Our planet cannot sustain the life that's already here. We have quadrupled the size of the human race in 100 years time (1920s to 2020s) which is insane.
There are already not enough music jobs for all the qualified, talented and experienced candidates that exist, what would we do with a thousand Mozarts at once?
After they finish all the ad jingles, hold music and background sound for animated promotional and training videos...
0 fucking chance either of them want more mozarts anyway.
They want more meat for the money generator. But they also buy their own bullshit about rich people being brilliant when.. Well it's seeming increasingly like it's an inverse correlation.
Which of these bozos is this quoting? Sounds like some stupid shit Elon would say, only he's dumb enough to think the planet could sustain 1 trillion humans.
We already have many thousand Mozarts. In every country on the planet there are many astonishing musicians that you will never hear of because capitalism and the music/entertainment industries want to believe that musical talent is magic. Why? Because they make more money that way.
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The pavement is rich people*.
Which is... less punchy. Sorry.
"Have lotsa kids. The more you have, the more chances they'll make it big in Hollywood."
And them wanting a trillion people just means they want more desperate low-waged workers, not artists
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44860924
https://myferretsatepepethefrog.blogspot.com/2023/12/lords-of-misery-reason-for-season-2023.html
What these would-be Mozarts need is unconditional basic income.
Nor of any of the other 999 talented people.
It would simply haven't been so unique.
https://bsky.app/profile/jeremyjenkins.jdjenkins.co.uk/post/3kgt6lai3zk2v
The Renaissance did not favor the existing fat cats. In fact, most of them died off before it began.
Pass me the popcorn.
Florence Price.
Google her.
You're welcome.
Which Musk obviously does not want.
Anyways, forget Mozart, I want another Igor Stravinsky Rite of Spring moment!
1. Bend all of society to our half-witted ideological will
2. ???
3. Profit
Muskito has no sense of scale, or understanding how humans work
exploiting them in ways that deprive us of talent and brilliance by widespread economic exploitation and pustulant corruption.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
Launch these fuckers into the sun.
jfc these malignant repro-worship navel-gazers
If you want more Mozarts you need UBI.
…wait for it…
…could enhance and amplify musical talent I.e. manufacture Mozarts
UBI can't come fast enough, no one should have to do 2-8 jobs to survive outrageous bills.
No one has the time to bring something new to the table, we're all too bloody tired.
Thank you for shopping with us. We'll send a confirmation when your Alesis keyboard has shipped.
—Stephen Jay Gould
I'm also bad at jokes. Again, I'm sorry you had to sit through this.
As always, capitalists are only interested in a bigger pie if they can also have more of a percentage of the pie.
Mozarts for when actual Mozart concerts get emptier by the day?
(But seriously, you're absolutely right)
So, he had at least three generations of relative economic security preceding him.
Parents do not have the money to invest in their children's future, and schools don't have the staff/resources to properly assist children into their passions. Why? Because of the wealthy elite.
What if the women already ARE the Mozarts?
this is the closest theyve ever been to being self aware
Covid schwächt außerdem die Zeugungsfähigkeit, so dass die Bevölkerung deutlich langsamer wachsen wird.
- I'm claiming to be another Copernicus...!
(Apologies to the music lovers, but as Jeremy said you're already catered for...)
My Copernican Revolution is in Aerodynamics, where a similarly simple 'change of focal point' will unlock untold wonders...
P.S. Word has it, Mozart's sister was way better at composing than her famous brother, but unfortunately for her, and all of us, she was a woman...
- Stephen Jay Gould
After they finish all the ad jingles, hold music and background sound for animated promotional and training videos...
They want more meat for the money generator. But they also buy their own bullshit about rich people being brilliant when.. Well it's seeming increasingly like it's an inverse correlation.
2. Make babies.
3. ?????
4. MOZARTS!