I would take Elon Musk over Trump but suggest that Elon undergoes a mental makeover. Elon Musk is weird. He had the foresight to dream up Hyperloop. Hyperloop is the pneumatic mode of transportation that the world has been needing forever. But he is also engaged in subverting this noble vision by going back to the past in ways that are, frankly, stupid.
The stupidity of today's market
Elon is just following the market which is based on profits that are iffy and short term. It would take one wrong Trump move to tumble the entire edifice. For the moment fortune is smiling on Elon's cars and his promises that batteries and even driverless vehicles will own the world.
Sadly he has competition. It is all feeding into the zeitgeist of or deficient, unjust and therefore obsolete economy.
Elon should shelve traffic entirely
In a fit of Trumpian hubris, Elon recently founded the Boring Company. One of its stellar ambitions is to drill tunnels adjacent to the San Andreas fault and under the East Coast corridor that Trump believes can be a fracking wonderland. Elon's motive - noted in the marvelous info-text below - is to zap traffic.
The monumental stupidity of this assumption is known to every resident of Manhattan which is host to innumerable bridges and tunnels already. Tunnels do not diminish traffic, they make it the global default.
How Musk's Tunnel Boring Would Work https://t.co/tW5CwlG0Pp via @Futurism
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) July 27, 2017
The answer to getting rid of traffic is getting rid of cars.
Elon should learn about cyber communities. He should see that a world of cyber communities linked by Hyperloop transit of various speeds and capacities is the absolute best solution to everything.
The Trump analogy
Trump's MAGA (Make America Great AGAIN) is just as Pied Piperish as Elon's siren call to get rid of gridlock. They are both impossible dreams and have no relevance to a viable future.
Cyber communities are the answer
We cannot have an economy based on the growth we are now relying on. It will go away or be warmed away or otherwise collapse. We can have one based on an ethical move in humankind, on a willingness to recreate a world of actual face to face interaction, not face into a device. We can have an economy where what we manufacture are the elements that are universally needed to build cyber communities from the ground up.
We can assume control of the planet.
Learn by failing
Each in their own way Trump and Musk, by being very wrong, will instruct us in what to avoid. That seems to be the dominant dynamic in these odd years of history.
Trump might win if he knew how to look into the future and watch his tongue and if he made cyber communities rather than Steve Bannon his coach. Elon will win unless he can bamboozle the buying public into a continuation of today's fatal love affair with the automobile.
