I don’t think they’ve ever actually done anything? Terrorism, legally, has a very precise definition. If you simply start calling orgs terrorists because they are adversarial, you set the precedent for legal political persecution at levels that not even Trump and co dares to do. Put simply, it goes against the very founding principles.
I know that’s the rational thing to think, but the reality is that they often don’t leave anyways. Look at Europe, they have billionaires too and they don’t leave despite being taxed higher than Us billionaires. Also a further reality is that the billionaires are not really citizens of any nation, they are highly mobile and probably spend time evenly in various countries. They already have their money well spread out.
I deleted my message because I realized you were talking about oligarchs not Nazis. It is still illogical though. The French Revolution happened already.
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history” - Hegel
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The founding fathers basically solved this issue through the electoral college, you’re not supposed to be voting for the president, you’re supposed to be voting for the people who will elect the president. But that’s all gone to shit, proving Hamilton’s warnings about populism extremely prescient.
What the fuck type mentality is this? Jesus fuck, might as well just take all media away from people and not let them take any decisions ever, they are clearly not to be trusted with any freedom.
Post structuralists in shambles
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.
I really wasn’t going to dignify this with an answer. But fuck it, I have nothing better to do it seems.
Yes corporations are more efficient by exploiting resources to the last drop, including people (to the extent that the law and the individual allow), no shit Sherlock, that’s kind of the point. But the people are there willingly, many of them could have worked at NASA or any other STEM job but they took the job Musk offered them because he was offering a different experience than what they could have received anywhere else, and of course the promise of future riches. I understand your point of view better than you think, I just reject it because it does not apply universally. Not everyone is coerced into accepting lower pay or working more hours, some people choose that because their job is more important to them than most other things. So yes exploitation of labor happens, but at what can only be described elite level jobs, the employees that choose to be paid below market rate do so out of their choice. These are not people struggling to pay rent, they are making 3 figures most of them if not all of them. A far cry from the cashiers at Walmart.
The thing is that if you look at the way science and technology progresses it ca be boiled down to optimization in the use of energy and resources. Government agencies will never do that because of the way they are incentivized to operate which by the way is not to benefit the people, that’s a naive and utopian view of government, rather they are optimized to never spend less this quarter than last quarter because they get their budget cut if they do. You are deluded if you think a single government official in any country in any government is concerned with “the people” more than they are in their career and the budget they manage. I’ll repeat this, the government is a distinct entity from the people with different incentives and motivations, same as a corporation or an NGO or any other organization. They are all different groups with different goals and motivations and the people are yet another. Each serves themselves and that ‘s how we achieve balance. But I digress, the way incentives are set up for the government is to spend more and more even when there is no logical reason to spend more. Which is why they could not achieve what SpaceX did.
But here’s what crazy about you telling me I’m trolling, or maybe you didn’t read my edit, but I agree with you! NASA has a distinct role in the future which is to dedicate itself to research that might not have obvious commercial application but could benefit humanity in other ways, I used the USPS example: it would be kinda stupid to have USPS make it’s own trucks when it is better at doing logistics which is a task that doesn’t have a commercial upside without becoming so expensive that it hurts most of the population.
I do not know about what original conversation you refer to as my first comment was always about efficiency and cost cutting which is the only thing that will enable mass space exploration, mining and commerce and maybe colonization one day (opening the door for all kinds of human organization schemes and experiments that are no longer possible on earth due to social ossification). For me that was always the goal of NASA, and yes without NASA there would be no SpaceX, just like there would be no NASA without Newton and no Newton without Descartes and so on. No human endeavor is built from the clouds, there’s always a precursor, we can trace anything and everything to our first ancestors if you like and then to the first bacteria life forms.
And yes SpaceX itself will become a bloated, inefficient monster one day, that is the lifecycle of these entities. The argument for free markets (actual free markets not the corporatocratic protectionist nightmare that is the US system) is that a competitor will come about and do the same thing better and take their market from them if they fail to improve themselves. But maybe that doesn’t happen, at that point you will have me right by your side calling for the nationalization of SpaceX, but we are not there yet.
But they had no incentives to send the shuttle more often because they do not have a commercial interest in being able to do so. It’s very easy to say, they could have done X or Y thing, but here’s the thing: they didn’t, not for decades and they are still not doing it now. Theoretically given the resources they have they should have never been able to hav been shown by Space X how to save costs, but that’s the paradox of having a lot of theoretically infinite funding (in relative terms) you dont have an incentive to squeeze every little drop of efficiency that you can.
Sure you raise some good points, but you also seem to have glossed over how absolutely bloated the agency is by their own admission in this paper. Why did NASA need all that personnel when SpaceX did better with a fraction? And if what you say is true about hyper specialization is true, which org do you think was more hyper specialized the one that had magnitudes more employees or the one that had to do with a fraction of the money and the personnel.
Again, the fact of the matter is SpaceX is more efficient at this than NASA. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact confirmed by NASA themselves. That’s the bottom line for me here.
If we are gonna fret over collateral damage of every little thing we do, we might as well go back to the caves. Steps are taken to reduce it but it can never be fully avoided. Has a NASA rocket never exploded? Would you rather freeze human technology and science in its current state? Because if you look at history we break shit in order to learn how to not break shit and how to fix shit and how to improve it. I’m frankly sick of this performative ludditism.
Edit: that being said I am not advocating for dismantling NASA or anything. The way I see it NASA should focus on research, while SpaceX can focus on making commercially viable rockets. Like we don’t have USPS making their trucks.
That’s bound to happen every now and then. At least it hasn’t happened with people inside.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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Humans literally evolved to use tools, it’s like asking a tiger to hunt without using their claws. Taking tools away from humans is not making them equal to the animal they are hunting, it’s handicapping them.
If you want to make them equal then the fight is 1 v 1 and the human has tools.