The slap fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has highlighted the absurdity of keeping so much of our space program and satellite internet infrastructure in the hands of a single oligarch.
No this the one time I’m with the commies. Nationalize that shit. Like you said it’s all taxpayer money anyway. A little bit of Wall Street speculation, but who gives a fuck about those people
I fully agree. Any industry that can’t survive on its own and needs public funds, shouldn’t exist. If it’s an essential service it should be nationalized.
This is the same mistake everyone makes. They think Donald Trump is just a person. That he actually matters and we just have to get rid of him and everything will be okay.
It doesn’t work that way.
As fascism didn’t die with Hitler, it’s not going to die with Trump. All of the problems — all of the rifts in our society — will still be there when he’s gone.
Are you against universal and free healthcare, education and retirement? Are you against improving worker rights, paid holidays, sick leave, guaranteed housing and guaranteed employment? Are you against unionisation of workplaces and collective worker decisions mattering in business? Are you against heavy regulation against climate change and pollution of the environment? Are you against anti-racism, feminism, anti-fascism and the redistribution of wealth from the richest to the poorest? I’m sure you have a lot more common ground with us commies than you think
No I’m also with the commies on single payer health care and super high tax brackets for the rich. I do hate me a fascism, infact I hate all authoritarians.
I’m clearly for the workers rights we have fought for and established in this country. And while I can acknowledge the communist impact in these achievements, I would not go ahead and give you guys full credit nor say that these are policies that are specific to you. Most of this stuff is just center/left social welfare and human rights. Commies are the ones that like to do purity tests and isolate anyone that doesn’t agree with 100% of your policy points.
Pretty big jumps from liberal to leftist to self proclaimed communist ideas on how these ideas and policies look, so yes we agree on general principles and concepts. But we certainly don’t agree on how to bring them about.
Also, every single self-proclaimed communist is on the suspect list because you guys did a lot of campaigning against Joe Biden to help Donald Trump get elected so I’m just saying I don’t really fuck with you guys anymore. That’s my new purity test. Did you support Joe Biden and Kamala during the most important election in American history?
I’m a communist and I believe in the expropriation of their capital to eliminate super-richness, not in their taxation.
workers rights we have fought for and established in this country
Your country (the US judging by the comment) has miserable worker rights, as a western-European. Worker rights are bad here, but the US takes the cake.
I would not go ahead and give you guys full credit nor say that these are policies that are specific to you. Most of this stuff is just center/left social welfare and human rights
I’m not so sure. The legal abolition of homelessness and unemployment is far from being a centre/left welfare measure, as evidenced by the fact that the only countries that have achieved this are communist ones such as Cuba or the Soviet Union.
we certainly don’t agree on how to bring them about
We don’t agree on how to bring them about because the liberal method of bringing them about is proven ineffective in every single instance of liberal democracy. Worker rights and welfare are systematically being eroded in essentially all liberal democracies for the past 3-4 decades, home ownership rates decrease, unemployment increases, retirement age gets delayed (Denmark just rose it to 70 years e.g.), education and healthcare budgets get gutted, infrastructure crumbles, real wages diminish for the majority of the population, and little action is taken against climate change. There were only advancements in worker rights in Europe (and less so in the USA) because of the fear of communist revolution in the past century, hence the complete lack of progress and actual degradation of rights and democracy with the rise of the far right all over the Western World.
I’m not USian so I didn’t support any of your genocidal candidates. Funny how you talked of purity tests earlier in your comment and come up with that later. But as an outsider: the US liberal obsession with blaming the election loss on the progressives and not on, you know, the politicians enacting genocide and not doing anything about improving the living conditions of people in the US while in government seems pretty weird. If the Democrats can’t bring themselves to even remotely appear more appealing than LITERAL DONALD TRUMP to the average voter, what the fuck are they doing?
Most of those things I mentioned are/were a material reality in socialist countries such as Cuba or the Soviet Union, except for climate change and pollution and some things regarding feminism and homosexuality due to moral shortcomings of 20th century thought.
Yes, I’m a tankie, you got me. How about you address the actual argument though? In the 1970s Soviet Union there was:
Guaranteed employment, free education to the highest level, free healthcare for everyone, guaranteed housing for everyone and the abolition of homelessness, 45h working week, retirement with guaranteed pension at 61 for men and at 55 for women, paid holiday and sick leave, highest unionisation population in the world, more female engineers inside the Soviet Union than in the rest of the world combined, lowest level of wealth inequality in the history of the region, subsidised and affordable basics like energy access or public transit… The list goes on and on.
How about you try to refute any of these individual claims I made instead of dismissing the actual historical reality just because you dislike my political views? Spoiler alert: you won’t find reliable sources contradicting any of my claims and I can provide sources to all of it because I actually know what I’m talking about.
See, that’s just cognitive dissonance. You start by saying it’s only in theory, and when prompted with actual examples of this existing, you just shut your ears. I went as far as being honest on the particular points that were lacking, such as women/homosexual rights or climate/pollution regulation, but you’re incapable of engaging with honest and reality-based analysis because it contradicts your absorbed anticommunist propaganda.
NASA was always there and they couldn’t achieve what SpaceX has while simultaneously having a lot more capital to do so. I’m sorry but if there’s any proof that private sector’s self interest is a better driver of innovation than common interest SpaceX is it. This is a terrible idea that sounds like a good idea if you do not understand how good Musk was and is at cutting costs. That’s his actual real skill in business and is well documented. Doesn’t make him less of a prick but you also cannot downplay what he has achieved with this company.
The agency that landed people on the moon so long ago most of the people involved have died if old age, and the event will soon pass out of living memory?
The one where when they let a single rocket explode, one time, rocked the nation, because their record was so close to flawless?
The one that constantly gives us new sources for scientific data?
let’s not forget the agency that launched the probe that passed the edge of the solar system and is still functional and doing valuable things…… in the 70s
So let’s assume you aren’t a moon landing denier and use that as a baseline, NASA is clearly capable of things given the right circumstances and budget.
SpaceX benefited from his reputation and money, because they sure as shit didn’t benefit from his technical acumen.
Business wise he is successful because he’s rich and influential and that works to mitigate how shitty he is at actually running an organisation, that doesn’t mean he has skills as a business person that means he has money and influence, in his case originally from the mine, then from buying and bullying his was in to businesses that were technologically sound and boosting them with his money.
You could make an argument he’s a relatively good investor, but he’s an actively bad CEO.
NASA is clearly capable of things given the right circumstances and budget.
Absolutely agree with this but there is no denying the innovation levels at spacex are higher (I’m not saying this is down to musk specifically. The man is a horror story of a human).
We were all in total awe when seeing booster stages land themselves successfully for the first time. It was such a giant leap forward and to the best of my knowledge no government funded space agency was even considering it before spacex.
SpaceX has an internal team that works to make sure Musk can’t interfere with anything, because he’s so bad at managing businesses. Gwynne Shotwell is the one in charge of SpaceX.
I am not surprised in the slightest. I mean if you have a bunch of smart, highly motivated people it sounds like keeping the crazy man at arms length is the kind of thing they’d organise very effectively.
They landed people on the moon and then did fuck all for decades.
When Musk started SpaceX he was not well known yet, SpaceX came before Tesla.
He was able to get into the businesses he has because he was rich yes, but you can find many accounts of engineers that worked under him speak of how good he was at finding ways to cut unnecessary costs.
He’s not a technical genius that’s for sure. But he has been a good CEO for SpaceX. Terrible one for Tesla though, mostly because he bought into his own myth and became a drug addict. But I refuse to simply wave away his achievements simply because I don’t like him. I can not like someone and still acknowledge they have done something good.
They landed people on the moon and then did fuck all for decades.
Indeed, all i was saying is that they were capable given budget and circumstances.
That budget and direction comes from the government.
When Musk started SpaceX he was not well known yet, SpaceX came before Tesla.
I will admit, i thought spacex was just another company he bought his way in to, like tesla, seems i was mistaken about that.
He was able to get into the businesses he has because he was rich yes, but you can find many accounts of engineers that worked under him speak of how good he was at finding ways to cut unnecessary costs.
And you can equally find many accounts of having to distract him from the day to day operations because he’s unreliable , unpredictable and chaotic (none of those meant in a good way).
He’s also known for buying good press and using litigation to silence people.
He’s not a technical genius that’s for sure. But he has been a good CEO for SpaceX.
I doubt this, but that could just be bias, i don’t have any actual evidence of the long term impact of him as CEO.
Recently though, he’s provably been significantly more of a liability than a benefit, even if just from a PR and public sentiment point of view.
But I refuse to simply wave away his achievements simply because I don’t like him. I can not like someone and still acknowledge they have done something good.
Indeed, i push back on the myth that he’s some self made tony stark genius, but it isn’t like he’s not achieved anything.
I would personally attribute most of that to neptoism, wealth, luck and opportunity, but that doesn’t remove the achievement itself.
This is the thing, NASA is underfunded as it is, if we nationalized SpaceX, we wouldn’t actually continue to fund it appropriately and it would simply die. Actually, with trump at the helm, nationalizing it would mean Trump immediately liquidating it. SpaceX is definitely the most successful rocket company in the US. It would be an awful shame for the space industry and for humanity’s future in space.
I hate musk as much as the next guy, but I think the success of spaceX is undeniable. Their success with reusable rockets is not just impressive, it’s ground breaking and important. Developing a fully reusable rocket is probably the most important challenge humans are working on in this era, and I only know of three companies attempting to do it. I don’t want to kill the company that’s furthest along.
Not to mention that Musk himself contributed nothing to SpaceX’s technical achievements. All he did was insist that the audio of their launches and recoveries include employees cheering maniacally - easily the most annoying aspect of SpaceX.
Let’s say I bought you a car, I paid for it in full and then gave it to you, and in return you sometimes drive me around.
Let’s say I get tired of this arrangement, should I repossess the car just to drive it into the ocean? What would be the point of that? Sure, it’s rightfully mine, but what good does it do to destroy it?
“IT BELONGS TO US” is not a very compelling argument for arbitrary distribution.
Us? Do you own NASA? Do you have any say on how funds are assigned to NASA? No? Then it doesn’t belong to “Us” it belongs to the government, a distinct organization with different goals and motivations than “Us” the people.
Of course he was always a jerk, but I still think of a reality where Elon never went (officially) Nazi and just stuck with his otherwise important companies. Tesla being an important early mover in EVs, especially in such an oil-dependent country, and all the cool stuff SpaceX has been up to.
You could always just fund the space agency you already have, instead of funneling money to a foreign billionaire.
No this the one time I’m with the commies. Nationalize that shit. Like you said it’s all taxpayer money anyway. A little bit of Wall Street speculation, but who gives a fuck about those people
Good point.
So you wanna nationalize the whole telecom industry then?
Well, now that you bring it up…
I fully agree. Any industry that can’t survive on its own and needs public funds, shouldn’t exist. If it’s an essential service it should be nationalized.
So you want Donald Trump in charge of the telecom industry and any other industries that have received some sort of public subsidy?
Yeah, maybe we can nationalize them with the clause that it kicks in when his heart stops beating
This is the same mistake everyone makes. They think Donald Trump is just a person. That he actually matters and we just have to get rid of him and everything will be okay.
It doesn’t work that way.
As fascism didn’t die with Hitler, it’s not going to die with Trump. All of the problems — all of the rifts in our society — will still be there when he’s gone.
Very true. It’s easy to focus on a figurehead and much harder to target a broad feeling of disillusionment affecting tens of millions.
lol you really threatened Lemmy with a good time
Yes, absolutely. And power too
And pharma. And O&G
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
Yes but with very little to show for it. If the government just treated all undelivered orders as debt, it would end up deep in the red.
What do you mean little to show for it?
Reusable rockets are cool
Never lived up to the hype. Take almost as much effort to get ready for another flight as building another one.
it’ll be sold to the highest bidder is my bet
I would find it funny that billionaires would pass off the opportunity of taking musk’s position on a discount
I’ll settle for whichever one annoys him the most.
Are you against universal and free healthcare, education and retirement? Are you against improving worker rights, paid holidays, sick leave, guaranteed housing and guaranteed employment? Are you against unionisation of workplaces and collective worker decisions mattering in business? Are you against heavy regulation against climate change and pollution of the environment? Are you against anti-racism, feminism, anti-fascism and the redistribution of wealth from the richest to the poorest? I’m sure you have a lot more common ground with us commies than you think
No I’m also with the commies on single payer health care and super high tax brackets for the rich. I do hate me a fascism, infact I hate all authoritarians.
I’m clearly for the workers rights we have fought for and established in this country. And while I can acknowledge the communist impact in these achievements, I would not go ahead and give you guys full credit nor say that these are policies that are specific to you. Most of this stuff is just center/left social welfare and human rights. Commies are the ones that like to do purity tests and isolate anyone that doesn’t agree with 100% of your policy points.
Pretty big jumps from liberal to leftist to self proclaimed communist ideas on how these ideas and policies look, so yes we agree on general principles and concepts. But we certainly don’t agree on how to bring them about.
Also, every single self-proclaimed communist is on the suspect list because you guys did a lot of campaigning against Joe Biden to help Donald Trump get elected so I’m just saying I don’t really fuck with you guys anymore. That’s my new purity test. Did you support Joe Biden and Kamala during the most important election in American history?
I’m a communist and I believe in the expropriation of their capital to eliminate super-richness, not in their taxation.
Your country (the US judging by the comment) has miserable worker rights, as a western-European. Worker rights are bad here, but the US takes the cake.
I’m not so sure. The legal abolition of homelessness and unemployment is far from being a centre/left welfare measure, as evidenced by the fact that the only countries that have achieved this are communist ones such as Cuba or the Soviet Union.
We don’t agree on how to bring them about because the liberal method of bringing them about is proven ineffective in every single instance of liberal democracy. Worker rights and welfare are systematically being eroded in essentially all liberal democracies for the past 3-4 decades, home ownership rates decrease, unemployment increases, retirement age gets delayed (Denmark just rose it to 70 years e.g.), education and healthcare budgets get gutted, infrastructure crumbles, real wages diminish for the majority of the population, and little action is taken against climate change. There were only advancements in worker rights in Europe (and less so in the USA) because of the fear of communist revolution in the past century, hence the complete lack of progress and actual degradation of rights and democracy with the rise of the far right all over the Western World.
I’m not USian so I didn’t support any of your genocidal candidates. Funny how you talked of purity tests earlier in your comment and come up with that later. But as an outsider: the US liberal obsession with blaming the election loss on the progressives and not on, you know, the politicians enacting genocide and not doing anything about improving the living conditions of people in the US while in government seems pretty weird. If the Democrats can’t bring themselves to even remotely appear more appealing than LITERAL DONALD TRUMP to the average voter, what the fuck are they doing?
*in theory
Most of those things I mentioned are/were a material reality in socialist countries such as Cuba or the Soviet Union, except for climate change and pollution and some things regarding feminism and homosexuality due to moral shortcomings of 20th century thought.
A tankie says what?
Yes, I’m a tankie, you got me. How about you address the actual argument though? In the 1970s Soviet Union there was:
Guaranteed employment, free education to the highest level, free healthcare for everyone, guaranteed housing for everyone and the abolition of homelessness, 45h working week, retirement with guaranteed pension at 61 for men and at 55 for women, paid holiday and sick leave, highest unionisation population in the world, more female engineers inside the Soviet Union than in the rest of the world combined, lowest level of wealth inequality in the history of the region, subsidised and affordable basics like energy access or public transit… The list goes on and on.
How about you try to refute any of these individual claims I made instead of dismissing the actual historical reality just because you dislike my political views? Spoiler alert: you won’t find reliable sources contradicting any of my claims and I can provide sources to all of it because I actually know what I’m talking about.
No thanks.
See, that’s just cognitive dissonance. You start by saying it’s only in theory, and when prompted with actual examples of this existing, you just shut your ears. I went as far as being honest on the particular points that were lacking, such as women/homosexual rights or climate/pollution regulation, but you’re incapable of engaging with honest and reality-based analysis because it contradicts your absorbed anticommunist propaganda.
What do you mean by that?
NASA was always there and they couldn’t achieve what SpaceX has while simultaneously having a lot more capital to do so. I’m sorry but if there’s any proof that private sector’s self interest is a better driver of innovation than common interest SpaceX is it. This is a terrible idea that sounds like a good idea if you do not understand how good Musk was and is at cutting costs. That’s his actual real skill in business and is well documented. Doesn’t make him less of a prick but you also cannot downplay what he has achieved with this company.
The agency that landed people on the moon so long ago most of the people involved have died if old age, and the event will soon pass out of living memory?
The one where when they let a single rocket explode, one time, rocked the nation, because their record was so close to flawless?
The one that constantly gives us new sources for scientific data?
Yeah fuck them. They never made a dick rocket.
let’s not forget the agency that launched the probe that passed the edge of the solar system and is still functional and doing valuable things…… in the 70s
Oh, wow, you might wanna sit down for this.
which part? it’s still transmitting right? and they got useful and interesting data from it only a few years ago
No, honey, it’s 2025.
I don’t know what happened to you, but im so fucking sorry.
Edit: you can down vote me all you want. It doesn’t change the truth. Odds are everyone you knew is dead.
What are you talking about. They were saying nasa sent it to space in the 70s and it’s still functioning.
I’m sorry… dick rocket? Your issue with SpaceX is that the rockets are… rocket shaped?
Like everything else notwithstanding, physics dictates the shapes of these things. That is why they all look rather… dick-ish
Yes im coming out against dick rockets here.
You mean the NASA who landed people on the moon?
So let’s assume you aren’t a moon landing denier and use that as a baseline, NASA is clearly capable of things given the right circumstances and budget.
SpaceX benefited from his reputation and money, because they sure as shit didn’t benefit from his technical acumen.
Business wise he is successful because he’s rich and influential and that works to mitigate how shitty he is at actually running an organisation, that doesn’t mean he has skills as a business person that means he has money and influence, in his case originally from the mine, then from buying and bullying his was in to businesses that were technologically sound and boosting them with his money.
You could make an argument he’s a relatively good investor, but he’s an actively bad CEO.
Absolutely agree with this but there is no denying the innovation levels at spacex are higher (I’m not saying this is down to musk specifically. The man is a horror story of a human).
We were all in total awe when seeing booster stages land themselves successfully for the first time. It was such a giant leap forward and to the best of my knowledge no government funded space agency was even considering it before spacex.
Perhaps look into the DC-X program, fully 20 years before SpaceX Falcon: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
Undeniably, they’ve been doing amazing work (at least from my rocketry technology peasant point of view).
SpaceX has an internal team that works to make sure Musk can’t interfere with anything, because he’s so bad at managing businesses. Gwynne Shotwell is the one in charge of SpaceX.
I am not surprised in the slightest. I mean if you have a bunch of smart, highly motivated people it sounds like keeping the crazy man at arms length is the kind of thing they’d organise very effectively.
They landed people on the moon and then did fuck all for decades.
When Musk started SpaceX he was not well known yet, SpaceX came before Tesla.
He was able to get into the businesses he has because he was rich yes, but you can find many accounts of engineers that worked under him speak of how good he was at finding ways to cut unnecessary costs.
He’s not a technical genius that’s for sure. But he has been a good CEO for SpaceX. Terrible one for Tesla though, mostly because he bought into his own myth and became a drug addict. But I refuse to simply wave away his achievements simply because I don’t like him. I can not like someone and still acknowledge they have done something good.
Indeed, all i was saying is that they were capable given budget and circumstances.
That budget and direction comes from the government.
I will admit, i thought spacex was just another company he bought his way in to, like tesla, seems i was mistaken about that.
And you can equally find many accounts of having to distract him from the day to day operations because he’s unreliable , unpredictable and chaotic (none of those meant in a good way).
He’s also known for buying good press and using litigation to silence people.
I doubt this, but that could just be bias, i don’t have any actual evidence of the long term impact of him as CEO.
Recently though, he’s provably been significantly more of a liability than a benefit, even if just from a PR and public sentiment point of view.
Indeed, i push back on the myth that he’s some self made tony stark genius, but it isn’t like he’s not achieved anything.
I would personally attribute most of that to neptoism, wealth, luck and opportunity, but that doesn’t remove the achievement itself.
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That’s true but it doesn’t solve the problem now.
This is the thing, NASA is underfunded as it is, if we nationalized SpaceX, we wouldn’t actually continue to fund it appropriately and it would simply die. Actually, with trump at the helm, nationalizing it would mean Trump immediately liquidating it. SpaceX is definitely the most successful rocket company in the US. It would be an awful shame for the space industry and for humanity’s future in space.
I hate musk as much as the next guy, but I think the success of spaceX is undeniable. Their success with reusable rockets is not just impressive, it’s ground breaking and important. Developing a fully reusable rocket is probably the most important challenge humans are working on in this era, and I only know of three companies attempting to do it. I don’t want to kill the company that’s furthest along.
You guys are so stuck in the cult of personality. WE PAID FOR EVERYTHING SPACEX DID. IT BELONGS TO US.
Not to mention that Musk himself contributed nothing to SpaceX’s technical achievements. All he did was insist that the audio of their launches and recoveries include employees cheering maniacally - easily the most annoying aspect of SpaceX.
I’m sorry… you don’t think employees who are achieving world firsts are allowed to celebrate?
You must be fun at parties
This meme is even more annoying than SpaceX employees being ordered to cheer.
Let’s say I bought you a car, I paid for it in full and then gave it to you, and in return you sometimes drive me around.
Let’s say I get tired of this arrangement, should I repossess the car just to drive it into the ocean? What would be the point of that? Sure, it’s rightfully mine, but what good does it do to destroy it?
“IT BELONGS TO US” is not a very compelling argument for arbitrary distribution.
You paid for services rendered. By your logic you should eventually own your neighborhood grocery store because that’s where you buy your bread.
You’re talking to someone on lemmy, there’s a very high likelihood they think exactly that.
Us? Do you own NASA? Do you have any say on how funds are assigned to NASA? No? Then it doesn’t belong to “Us” it belongs to the government, a distinct organization with different goals and motivations than “Us” the people.
Of course he was always a jerk, but I still think of a reality where Elon never went (officially) Nazi and just stuck with his otherwise important companies. Tesla being an important early mover in EVs, especially in such an oil-dependent country, and all the cool stuff SpaceX has been up to.
I hear you, why can’t we be in that timeline?