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Trumps goons are going to sell out key functions of government to private buyers, like nasa to space x. This reminds me of when the USSR fell and all the shadiest people bought up the national industries.
I wonder who’s gonna buy the noaa. That’s the one I’m most concerned about.
NOAA goes to The Weather Company?
He makes Rogozin look competent
it won’t be though. spacex tech is massively reliant on NASA. if they do it they’ll hurt spacex in the long run. which means they’ll probably do it because musk is a fucking moron.
Surely he’ll strip NASA, put the bits he wants up for sale, then buy them for cheap.
Sure the best staff might leave, but he’ll probably keep enough of the organisation to get something out of it.
he’s gonna have to find more indentured slaves
indentured slaves can actually work though
Haha yeah, those bots are garbage. But the Figure 2 bots are already testing in BMW plants. And Elon won’t even have to threaten Open AI with regulation to get new tech. He can prolly just take from Boston Dynamics military contracts.
“… in the long run”
These aren’t people who understand what “in the long run” means.
This quarters profits must be higher than last quarters. Fuck anything beyond that
Space exploration certainly will be the final frontier, its the last thing this pathetic species will have ever worked on before blinking out of existence.
We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.
Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn’t care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.
SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing’s rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.
SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.
NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.
Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can’t grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.
We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.
Give the power to the people. All of them.
Space travel is exceptional in that you need an incredible amount of cooperation to get a project into space. The supply chains are insane, the component parts highly specialized and hugely expensive, and the range of expertise and knowledge required is simultaneously focused and intense and broad and varied. If human society ever does manage to transition to a genuine people power, space flight will be, to my knowledge, the very last thing we achieve, because it takes so many people working together to get it done. The scope of these projects makes you realise how easy it must have been to build the pyramids. Two brothers can build a plane that just about works, but to get a vehicle to orbit needs a city of people working together.
That’s all the reason it should be easier to distribute power. More people to distribute it between!
Remember when we paid people to do those things directly?
We, the American people, paid a lot of people each a reasonable salary to get to the moon.
Privatized spaceflight has we, the American people, pay a single entity less total money (they can make it more efficient, of course!). This concentrates decision-making and power.
That vehicle going in to orbit needs a city to work together. I want my taxes to pay that city and the people in it, not Boeing’s shareholders who aren’t helping put the vehicle into orbit, not Musk to build a second smaller city in Texas he is king of.
Thank you for your points. I completely agree that we should be paying the workers on the ground who get us to space instead of the wealthy who claim to own it.
Yes we should, and I hope we will. I would love to be able to imagine some kind of smooth, consensual, non violent transition to a society where we keep doing the same stuff but are fairly treated, but I have difficulty with that. And I think space would be the hardest industry to revolutionise because of the above. Not saying it’s impossible and I’m definitely not saying it’s not preferable!
Almost like Jim Bridenstone was a bad pick….
I wanna try something…
Ahem. Investors! I have the concept of a plan to put gigantic billboards in space that can be seen by half the planet at any given time. Give me money.
Didn’t coke propose doing that with colored powder on the moon?
In one of the Red Dwarf books, there’s a subplot about sending hundreds of stars supernova simultaneous in order to spell out Coke Adds Life in the sky.
Pepsi would be buried.
I didn’t know there were books!
I can only recommend the first two.
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
Better than Life
They’re no hitchhiker’s guide, but they have a go.
It only works for emerald heirs.
Space: the final (capitalistic) frontier.
“final”
Humanity: Let’s make a bunch of stories about how space capitalism has some really bad outcomes.
Also Humanity: That sound great! let’s do that!
People poke fun of Musk as being a idiot. But he had us Kaiser Soze’d by pretending to be dumb so that he could implement his self-serving ideas.
Musk is not the smart person behind any of the companies he is part of today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
… is why I would have invested in SpaceX pre-Russian aggression against NATO and their allies.
Now … no, thank you. They can keep their private equity to their little NAZI hands.
That’s why Musk is smart, because he is a scammer.
Some other country is gonna have the new nasa, and the united states is going to fall even further behind. It’ll just be a brain drain and most of it isn’t going to go to space-x.
Any suggestions on where to emigrate? Asking for a friend
If you’re a fundamental researcher, engineer, etc. come to the UK. We’ve got SO many job openings for those roles and would love to bring in talent to fill those roles because the local gammon isn’t up to the job.
Max pay is around 50k. Its better than most, for sure, but academics get treated way better in US or Germany
I wish I could, but good grief I’d be cutting my pay down to 25% if I moved to the UK
How much is your health insurance & car repayments cutting into your pay? What are your legal minimum days off? How many maternity/paternity days off is your employer legally required to give you? What are your employee rights? How walkable is your current city or do you require a car to literally go anywhere? It’s a trade-off.
NASA has already sent out emails to their teams and contractors about what implications this can have on their departments. Shit’s bad.
I had a lengthy argument with someone that Musk couldn’t possibly be kissing Trump’s ass for money - he’s a billionaire after all and “has all the money he needs”. No no, Musk is doing this out of the goodness of his cold billionaire heart. Isn’t it obvious?
Why are so many people so stupid? WHY?
As we all know, the ultra-rich are famous for getting to a certain level of wealth and saying, “NO MORE! I RENOUNCE THIS CAPITALIST SOCIETY AND NOW ONLY WORK FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY!”
I comfort myself by saying I have something Musk and his ilk never will: ENOUGH.
^ Brilliant comment.
Ah yes, the essential personality traits to becoming the richest person: integrity, and stopping once you have all the money you need.
They have a sense of “enough” and the concept of a thousand millions for someone who barely had a thousand hundreds or even just a thousand is so far out of their realm of understanding that they think “enough” must be a concept for capitalists too
Also dumb as rocks.
Elongated Muskrat is a billionaire who wants to become the first trillionaire. That’s what these people aren’t getting. It’s all just a game to him. He thinks that we live on a simulation and everyone else is an NPC. He now wants to set a new high score.
I had similar arguments and the synopsis is that people can’t admit being wrong because it makes them look weak. It’s a toxic masculinity and ego thing.
You basically double down on the bet and ride the boat right into hell over the waterfall.
Dead, but you never had to admit the other person was right about the waterfall!
That’s how kids were taught to think when I was in school. Did you get something wrong on your first try? You’re a failure! Take your F and move on, you’re not allowed to try again unless you fail your entire grade level. 12 years of my school system taught many people to have that ego you mentioned, myself included. I graduated high school 10 years ago and still struggle accepting my failures. I have to remind myself that in real life I can actually learn from my mistakes. Unfortunately many people never have that realization.
Ok I definitely got a different vibe from failing tests. I routinely would have to deal with that stuff again so it was a “you failed, we aren’t going to revisit it but you need to not make the same mistake again
Good things have happened to Elon, therefore he must be a good person, otherwise my worldview is destroyed and there is no point being good.
He efficiently using the government to make himself richer. What more did anybody expect?
Well… that, but inefficient.
What if these so-called efficiency measures actually help pave the way for the first civil outpost on Mars? I think I want to give people some benefit of the doubt, we can do better than what we have currently. Ideally, it’s realizing that there’s no such thing as scarcity in a boundless universe.
Make no mistake though, the Trump admin is giving grounds to fascism, and that’s a problem. Apologies if I sound unreasonably optimistic, I know a lot is happening which will ruin lives for many. No one should be okay with that.
There are still people who think humans can live on Mars, with today’s technology even?
The continuous radiation bombardment alone makes it virtually impossible, but the insane cold won’t help. Spending the rest of your life in cramped pods isn’t quite the psychological experience you would appreciate, and the low gravity is going to mush your muscles up. And there’s no way back, ever. So seeing mum and dad at christmas … fat chance. You might zoom them, with 20 minutes delay per direction. But Gen X billionaires that read too much shoddy scifi in their youth never think of those things.
Oh, and Elon promised us that Mars colony in 2021. There’s not even a starter kit on the surface yet.
What benefit does a civilian outpost on Mars give to our current society? We have effectively handled scarcity already. All scarcity that exists today is entirely manufactured by the owner class. We have the means to safely and effectively have infinite electricity, food, and housing. We choose not to. How would that change if we have a base on Mars?
And absolutely no one paying attention was shocked.
This is what losing a space race looks like.
