• @[email protected]
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    843 days ago

    Normally, I would have advocated for the nationalization of Starlink and SpaceX as a matter of national and global security, but it’s not like the current American regime would do any better. I’m not going to be counting on them to investigate, let alone prosecute the affairs of this Russian junkie-stooge either.

    • @[email protected]
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      873 days ago

      Regardless of who would do better, the entirety of SpaceX and Starlink were paid for using American taxpayer’s money and government contracts. We already paid for it, we should own it.

      • SeeMarkFly
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        263 days ago

        Ohh, just wait till they privatize weather, mail, prison. hospitals…

        It’s gonna be too expensive to live on this planet for YOU.

        • Zagorath
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          353 days ago

          Two of those are literally already privatised in America, and one more took some significant steps in that direction earlier this year.

          • @[email protected]
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            3 days ago

            one more took some significant steps in that direction earlier this year.

            One? Last I checked, both weather and mail are both on their way to privatization.

            • @[email protected]
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              42 days ago

              As I look out the window at rain that was in the forecast yesterday, but not this morning.

            • Zagorath
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              12 days ago

              Damn, mail too? That didn’t make international headlines the way shutting down the weather service did.

          • SeeMarkFly
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            12 days ago

            As rural hospitals shut down (due to lack of federal funding) they are being BOUGHT up by private corporations and LEASED back to the federal government (federal funding).

            It’s a LOT more money and it’s NOT going to the hospital.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 days ago

            Most prisons in the US are actually not privatized, although this is a bit of technicality as government-run prisons tend to have privatized a lot of their functions, like “catering” (lol) and guards etc.

    • @[email protected]
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      43 days ago

      Brain dead take honestly. Nationalization doesn’t work out 11 times out of 10. Look at NASA, SpaceX ran circles around them with a tini tiny fraction of the funding.

      Nationalization does not mean it belongs to “us” it belongs to the government, an entity with motivations, incentives and desires different from “us” the people.

      • @[email protected]
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        633 days ago

        Could you elaborate on how SpaceX “ran circles around NASA”, seeing as how NASA basically pioneered every single piece of modern space technology, and all SpaceX is doing is fumbling to rearrange it like Legos that explode on the launch pad? Lol

        • @[email protected]
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          313 days ago

          Not only that,but NASA gave this knowledge away for free - to the universities that taught the people who now work for Muskler.

          • @[email protected]
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            163 days ago

            Yeah. These dumbasses forget that government funding is what originally set the stage and enabled any progress at all for private company-entrepreneurs who benefitted from all that publicly available knowledge, paid for by our tax dollars.

            Innovation will slow to a trickle with all these government cuts because these companies literally can’t pay for anything not directly related to their bottom dollar, and none of them can see far enough past next quarter’s profits to invest in the future.

              • @[email protected]
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                82 days ago

                The whole point is that SpaceX’s contributions have been minimal… and have still been paid for by tax dollars anyways with all the contracts they’re getting. Their big thing is supposed to be reusable rockets… guess what, NASA already pioneered the concept of reusable spacecraft with their space shuttle.

                • @[email protected]
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                  2 days ago

                  https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20200001093.pdf

                  I’m just gonna reply to everyone with this, since it drives my point home and comes from NASA themselves. You can read it or not if you want, but my point is that SpaceX reduced costs in a way NASA by itself was not capable of doing. The main reason as you might imagine is the proper incentives were not there in the same way that they exist for private industry. Look at Section 3 point B. Institutional causes and cures of very high space launch cost.

              • @[email protected]
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                92 days ago

                Human knowledge is always cumulative ya dunce.

                Human knowledge can be (and historically, often has been) destroyed as well as accumulated. It’s a myth originating with the Whigs that history always moved in the direction of progress. As recent political events in the US have shown, that’s not true.

                nationalization doesn’t work, and it has never worked

                Except, for example, in every developed-world health care delivery system, all of which massively outperform the private-sector US system both on cost and on outcomes. Likewise, fire departments, interstate highway systems, public water supplies, armies, etc, etc.

                So before calling someone a dunce, you might do well to learn more about the many things you don’t know.

                • @[email protected]
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                  2 days ago

                  Well I never said anything about progress, I said it’s cumulative. We never destroy more than we have accumulated. None of the knowledge we have today would exist without the knowledge of our earliest of ancestors when Homo sapiens was still thousands of years away. That being said, looking at the sheer amount of time we’ve been accumulating knowledge even if we had a thousand years of absolute barbarity and massive ignorance, the statement that knowledge tends towards progress would still be true. The present is a blip in the scale of human history.

                  To address your other point. Yes I’ll admit that I was too universalistic in my argument in the heat of the moment so to speak. But the big caveat is that it does not necessarily lead to, and most always doesn’t lead to better service for end user. It’s a trade off in most cases. But I’ll never argue in favor of privatized healthcare or education for example. The loss in efficiency is simply not enough to justify the real human cost of the alternative. But cutting edge technology that is not essential, such as space travel, computers etc, belong in the private market where the right incentives to make improvements exist.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 days ago

          NASA basically pioneered every single piece of modern space technology

          Hate to say it, but it was actually the Nazis who pioneered a lot of modern space technology. The US massively refined and improved it - often with the help of “rescued” Nazi scientists.

          • @[email protected]
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            113 days ago

            Think objectively about things, don’t just say things to echo the hivemind.

            Fuck off with the notion that everything that contradicts your opinion is the “hivemind.” It is supremely condescending and toxic to pretend you’re the only one capable of independent thought.

            • @[email protected]
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              2 days ago

              Did I ever say or imply that everything that contradicts my opinion is of the hive mind? Because I don’t think I did. But this particular trope of trying to flatten any of the achievements of Musk’s companies simply because they are associated with him and calling for their nationalization is a tiresome talking point of the online “left” that simply parrots whatever everyone else “on their side” is supposed to think because it has leftie vibes. It’s as brain dead a take as any you would find on a Magatard community.

              And I do need to point out that nationalization is not inherently socialist or left wing at all.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 days ago

            They keep giving contracts to SpaceX because that’s the way the budgets are mandated from congress. They have X amount of money to distribute. Everything goes to generally the lowest bidder, and because there are only a handful of options, they have to keep using one contractor to produce their parts because it’s even more expensive to keep switching.

            So drop the attitude. Usually the worst bidder gets the job, and it ends up costing more money after everything is said and done.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 days ago

            I think you severely discount NASA’s achievements. I would wager the stagnation of NASA and the subsequent rise of SpaceX was largely due to a lack of funding for NASA and waning public interest and lack of leadership.

            I doubt the public would have tolerated the idea blowing up rockets until it worked as a good use of tax payer dollars. So did NASA fail us, or did the public fail NASA?

        • BremboTheFourth
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          23 days ago

          Judging by the way they spelled “teeny,” I can’t help but wonder if they might also be familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet

        • @[email protected]
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          13 days ago

          El problema principal de estúpidos como tú es asumir que puedes inferir absolutamente nada de la persona detrás de un username en una plataforma total y absolutamente anónima. Cara de cabron huelebicho.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 days ago

          It wasn’t by calling out people spouting takes they haven’t thought through for more than 5 minutes because they fit the vibes they like.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 days ago

        I actually am skeptical of nationalization. I think the free market is more efficient in most situations.

        But if you think SpaceX is running circles around NASA, well that’s so ridiculous that I’m starting to doubt myself.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 days ago

          They did though, they massively cut costs of launching a rocket, which is again the real barrier for space exploration, especially commercially viable space exploration. It’s not clear that NASA could have done that seeing how their costs remained roughly the same for decades, but don’t take it from me, take it from NASA themselves:

          https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20200001093.pdf

          What’s your counter argument for saying they didn’t run circles around NASA?

            • @[email protected]
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              12 days ago

              That’s bound to happen every now and then. At least it hasn’t happened with people inside.

                • @[email protected]
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                  22 days ago

                  Well the engineers at SpaceX are generally more responsible and more concerned with security than Tesla, if only because the hardware is so expensive. But yes, it could happen any of these days.