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We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

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  • Nationalizing companies is not going to fix the accountability issue we have in the country. The same problems are going to happen, just under new management.

    Very true. It seems like the most greedy destructive people inevitably rise to the top.

  • Sending something one way into space isn’t hard. Having it come back is. Having it, and all the parts that it took to get it there and back, be safely returned to earth and able to be reused is stupidly hard.

    Oh, I know, man I’ve been following the SpaceX project for the last 12 years. I’m a huge fan of outer space. But now that they’re slashing my science budgets for weapons budgets it makes me sad. And a bit mad.

  • Sending something one way into space isn’t hard. Having it come back is. Having it, and all the parts that it took to get it there and back, be safely returned to earth and able to be reused is stupidly hard.

    Like I said, I value the space telescopes more than the Rockets that take them into space. I like the Mars Rovers more than the penis rockets.

  • You're conflating Musk with his companies. He might be the one who founded them, but these companies run themselves. This goes for Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. The leadership, research, production, and management are all handled by company employees.

    But that's besides the point, regardless of how you feel about Musk himself, there's clearly a place for private companies in this area. NASA and other space agencies are not businesses, they're research agencies. Their job is to expand scientific knowledge and innovate new technology. They can't run a service like SpaceX, which btw doesn't only serve the government by also other governments and the private sector. It's better for them to just outsource shuttle launches entirely to the private sector which is why they've been doing it for decades. It just so happens that SpaceX provides this service at really good price reliably and safely, which makes them the best choice. It's symbiotic relationship. It's an ecosystem where one sector compliments the other.

    Idk why everyone keeps talking like nationalizing Elon musk companies means changing them? It’s just removing Elon musk from them, and then reordering them to the public.

    Also hello cyber truck called and that was Elon musk at the helm. He’s good for making good teams and bad decisions

  • I know it's asking a lot, but you could give an example instead of insulting me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Yes sorry. We nationalized General Motors in 2009 Amtrak in 1973 the banks in 2008.

    Don’t even get me started on World War II

  • I know it's asking a lot, but you could give an example instead of insulting me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    In the US we would remove the leadership, fix the problems with the companies. In this case it’s Elon who is a military risk and political liability. He has broken enough laws and violated our constitutional rights. We can happily remove him from the seat of his power, which are his companies, especially the publicly listed one. Under new leadership these companies can be returned to the public sector just like with General Motors.

  • this the one time I’m with the commies

    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?

  • First of all, it was performed the way that nobody knew what to even do with those privatization vouchers. They didn't directly give anyone stocks, just vouchers for part of a company etc. Those had to be exchanged for stocks.

    People didn't know what to do with them, people had problems feeding their families, and people were offered some money for them. And people thought that's what capitalism is, you get offered money for something, you give it. Nobody scams you, right?

    Since those oligarchs happened to all have right friends, it's without any doubt not a mistake that those stocks could even be sold.

    And - attention - another history lesson. All the Soviet propaganda against religion led to everyone becoming "kinda church-loving" in the 90-s initially. All the Soviet propaganda for scientific view of the world led to thousands of sects and charlatans, together scamming most of the population. All the Soviet propaganda for honest and labor ethic led to most people not even considering such scams really scams, because in Soviet propaganda doing business was treated same as scamming someone.

    So nobody even thought what's happening is wrong. And the part of the population which did understand was those who got the shorter stick. People losing themselves in a bottle or a needle, people literally dying from hunger, people having to do crime or prostitution or mercenary work to survive. It was an unholy kingdom where for a part of the population it seemed they are almost the middle class now, just like in those American movies and ads, and the other part saw those ads and those people daily, but could barely survive.

    And then, after a few years, the former part grew some understanding that Russia is approaching fascism, and the latter part, which already lived it since 1993, was so broken that it obeyed the fascists after they gave it a bit of a life without hunger and depression in the 00s.

    See, there is a layer of the Russian (and general ex-Soviet) culture, in vibes and emotions, showing things as they really were, but it's horrible to look into that. It was plainly impossible for a normal person to accept some group of people like Anatoly Sobchak's daughter as opposition. After real opposition figures were being marginalized, jailed and even murdered for a few years. After the Chechen wars. After the way that privatization happened, and the 1993. Nobody would follow people who are just a subset of the same evil, except playing clean because it's in fashion.

    Then, of course, such a decision, so to say, made by a whole country leads to madness.

    And this is what we live since then. Those stormtroopers on crutches storming Ukrainian positions - they know that their orders come from the evil itself. They are not fighting for something or against something, only to feel that evil as more material, or take their share of the suffering, or prove something to themselves. It's a whole society of depressed people who need to prove something to themselves, because everything around is both evil, fake and dirty, one yearns for purification. It's desperation of the better kind of people, whether you believe it or not. The worst kind finds ways not to die. It's even natural for humans, like best shown in Japanese culture of honorable death. In European military cultures honorable suicide was a thing, well, in 2022 a few Russian generals shot themselves. I've read about them.

    It's really disgusting to be of the "fat" part of the population of these two.

    Thank you for elaborating my point. It’s all very reminiscent of what’s going on right now in the United States. 20 years of an infowar and the American people seem to be in a similar position. The majority of this country doesn’t understand what going on in financial markets yet they all depend on them to survive their retirements. The wealth is being massively consolidated through means that people don’t understand.

    Anyway appreciate you bringing the proper details into my point. And the chilling reminder of what the future holds.

  • I don’t think what I’m saying is controversial.

    no, it's simply business as usual, nothing ever changes, nothing ever improves, and fuck you america, that's the way it has to be because reasons.

    I strongly suspect NASA can manage spaceX better than the ketamine kid. Why don't you give a fuck about those astronauts who have to put their faith in his hardware? why don't you give a fuck about the kids who are growing up in an age where that drug addled prick is put up as an icon of success?

    Do you really think soldiers sailors and airmen (and spacemonkeys) should have to rely on that HORSE DRUG ADDICTED PRICK for their mission critical infrastructure?

    If you do, fuck right off, you're either a musk fanboy or stockholder.

    Either way, get bent.

    I strongly suspect NASA can manage spaceX better than the ketamine kid. Why don’t you give a fuck about those astronauts who have to put their faith in his hardware? why don’t you give a fuck about the kids who are growing up in an age where that drug addled prick is put up as an icon of success?

    ROTFL, SpaceX managed 259 launch in 2024, show me how many launch managed NASA, if they are more than maybe you are right, else...

  • I never claimed to like Elon. I don’t. I never expressed support for this administration’s policies. I don’t.

    you just defend his right to run spaceX on specialK.

    mmkay bud.

    I don't give two flying fucks who runs space x. Once again. I'm not defending Elon in anyway.

    I am expressing my concern about the United States government nationalizing a private company. You're still making bassless assumptions. Pull your head out of your own ass and actually think about what I'm saying before spouting off at the mouth.

  • I never claimed to like Elon. I don’t. I never expressed support for this administration’s policies. I don’t.

    you just defend his right to run spaceX on specialK.

    mmkay bud.

    you just defend his right to run spacex on specialK.

    Is not the US "the land of the free" ?
    Obviously he has the right to run SpaceX, like you have the right to try to build another one.

    But obviously you seems to not understand what are the implication of setting this kind of precedent and all the implications that will arise. But that's ok, after all the only important thing is to hate Musk.

  • 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?

    super high tax brackets for the rich

    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?

  • Then make it work.

    Stop cutting their funding and saying the earth is flat and that global warming is a myth.

  • How has spacex had very few successes? Their Falcon 9 rocket is basically operating like clockwork. They launch more rockets than the rest of the world combined.

    The starship failures are higher profile but even those failures are typical when testing new vehicles, especially one as experimental and complex.

    They weren't as typical with previous SpaceX models, Starship is easily their least successful project.

    Since SpaceX is launching large quantities of commercial satellites, big whoop, do you also celebrate when companies buy back stocks?

  • Yes sorry. We nationalized General Motors in 2009 Amtrak in 1973 the banks in 2008.

    Don’t even get me started on World War II

    All of these were taken by the state, not the workers, which was the question.

  • Idk why everyone keeps talking like nationalizing Elon musk companies means changing them? It’s just removing Elon musk from them, and then reordering them to the public.

    Also hello cyber truck called and that was Elon musk at the helm. He’s good for making good teams and bad decisions

    I mean companies can force him out by themselves if they're pressured enough. Also all companies make unsuccessful business bets. What matters is that from a neutral third person point of view, these companies aren't doing anything that they're not supposed to be doing. They're putting sectors of the American economy in danger of collapse, they're not committing crimes left and right, and their services are satisfactory for most people.

  • Starlink should be globalized. A planet only needs one low-altitude orbiting communications network. Better to standardize the technology and platform and let them contribute to one system than to have a dozen identical competing systems crashing into each other and fucking things up for everyone.

    Ah. My Kessler syndrome is acting up again.

  • The automotive manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler were partially nationalized in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis as were several banks... these were less a full government takeover and more of a government guided restructuring, but the government owned large stakes in these companies. Before that, the only full nationalization of anything substantial was the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad and subsequent establishment of Consolidated Rail (branded as ConRail) the US's only national freight rail company.

    Conrail was later privatized into what is now the private companies CSX and Norfolk Southern. The collapse of Penn Central was the largest bankruptcy in history until Enron in the 1990's. Amtrak, our national passenger rail corporation, is also a nationalized entity created around the same time as ConRail, for similar reasons, and is still nationalized (although the Trump admin wants to privatize it).

    Didn't know about Amtrak. Interesting. Thanks

  • They weren't as typical with previous SpaceX models, Starship is easily their least successful project.

    Since SpaceX is launching large quantities of commercial satellites, big whoop, do you also celebrate when companies buy back stocks?

    Why would I celebrate stock buybacks?

    Also spacex lost like 20 or so Falcons before their first successful mission. Maybe they will explode as many Starships, but they have hit that number yet.

    It’s ok to hate Elon, and there are many valid criticisms to make regarding spacex, but they’re the best in the world right now and it isn’t even close.

    The biggest issue with Spacex is that Elon needs to be removed before he ruins it like he ruined Tesla.

  • you just defend his right to run spacex on specialK.

    Is not the US "the land of the free" ?
    Obviously he has the right to run SpaceX, like you have the right to try to build another one.

    But obviously you seems to not understand what are the implication of setting this kind of precedent and all the implications that will arise. But that's ok, after all the only important thing is to hate Musk.

    ffs have better standards in your selection of contractors. or perhaps you're on too much horse tranq too.

  • Former and current Microsofties react to the latest layoffs

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    eightbitblood@lemmy.worldE
    Incredibly well said. And couldn't agree more! Especially after working as a game dev for Apple Arcade. We spent months proving to them their saving architecture was faulty and would lead to people losing their save file for each Apple Arcade game they play. We were ignored, and then told it was a dev problem. Cut to the launch of Arcade: every single game has several 1 star reviews about players losing their save files. This cannot be fixed by devs as it's an Apple problem, so devs have to figure out novel ways to prevent the issue from happening using their own time and resources. 1.5 years later, Apple finishes restructuring the entire backend of Arcade, fixing the problem. They tell all their devs to reimplement the saving architecture of their games to be compliant with Apples new backend or get booted from Arcade. This costs devs months of time to complete for literally zero return (Apple Arcade deals are upfront - little to no revenue is seen after launch). Apple used their trillions of dollars to ignore a massive backend issue that affected every player and developer on Apple Arcade. They then forced every dev to make an update to their game at their own expense just to keep it listed on Arcade. All while directing user frustration over the issue towards developers instead of taking accountability for launching a faulty product. Literally, these companies are run by sociopaths that have egos bigger than their paychecks. Issues like this are ignored as it's easier to place the blame on someone down the line. People like your manager end up getting promoted to the top of an office heirachy of bullshit, and everything the company makes just gets worse until whatever corpse is left is sold for parts to whatever bigger dumb company hasn't collapsed yet. It's really painful to watch, and even more painful to work with these idiots.
  • 337 Stimmen
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    What I'm speaking about is that it should be impossible to do some things. If it's possible, they will be done, and there's nothing you can do about it. To solve the problem of twiddled social media (and moderation used to assert dominance) we need a decentralized system of 90s Web reimagined, and Fediverse doesn't deliver it - if Facebook and Reddit are feudal states, then Fediverse is a confederation of smaller feudal entities. A post, a person, a community, a reaction and a change (by moderator or by the user) should be global entities (with global identifiers, so that the object by id of #0000001a2b3c4d6e7f890 would be the same object today or 10 years later on every server storing it) replicated over a network of servers similarly to Usenet (and to an IRC network, but in an IRC network servers are trusted, so it's not a good example for a global system). Really bad posts (or those by persons with history of posting such) should be banned on server level by everyone. The rest should be moderated by moderator reactions\changes of certain type. Ideally, for pooling of resources and resilience, servers would be separated by types into storage nodes (I think the name says it, FTP servers can do the job, but no need to be limited by it), index nodes (scraping many storage nodes, giving out results in structured format fit for any user representation, say, as a sequence of posts in one community, or like a list of communities found by tag, or ... , and possibly being connected into one DHT for Kademlia-like search, since no single index node will have everything), and (like in torrents?) tracker nodes for these and for identities, I think torrent-like announce-retrieve service is enough - to return a list of storage nodes storing, say, a specified partition (subspace of identifiers of objects, to make looking for something at least possibly efficient), or return a list of index nodes, or return a bunch of certificates and keys for an identity (should be somehow cryptographically connected to the global identifier of a person). So when a storage node comes online, it announces itself to a bunch of such trackers, similarly with index nodes, similarly with a user. One can also have a NOSTR-like service for real-time notifications by users. This way you'd have a global untrusted pooled infrastructure, allowing to replace many platforms. With common data, identities, services. Objects in storage and index services can be, say, in a format including a set of tags and then the body. So a specific application needing to show only data related to it would just search on index services and display only objects with tags of, say, "holo_ns:talk.bullshit.starwars" and "holo_t:post", like a sequence of posts with ability to comment, or maybe it would search objects with tags "holo_name:My 1999-like Star Wars holopage" and "holo_t:page" and display the links like search results in Google, and then clicking on that you'd see something presented like a webpage, except links would lead to global identifiers (or tag expressions interpreted by the particular application, who knows). (An index service may return, say, an array of objects, each with identifier, tags, list of locations on storage nodes where it's found or even bittorrent magnet links, and a free description possibly ; then the user application can unify responses of a few such services to avoid repetitions, maybe sort them, represent them as needed, so on.) The user applications for that common infrastructure can be different at the same time. Some like Facebook, some like ICQ, some like a web browser, some like a newsreader. (Star Wars is not a random reference, my whole habit of imagining tech stuff is from trying to imagine a science fiction world of the future, so yeah, this may seem like passive dreaming and it is.)
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    You said it yourself: extra places that need human attention ... those need ... humans, right? It's easy to say "let AI find the mistakes". But that tells us nothing at all. There's no substance. It's just a sales pitch for snake oil. In reality, there are various ways one can leverage technology to identify various errors, but that only happens through the focused actions of people who actually understand the details of what's happening. And think about it here. We already have computer systems that monitor patients' real-time data when they're hospitalized. We already have systems that check for allergies in prescribed medication. We already have systems for all kinds of safety mechanisms. We're already using safety tech in hospitals, so what can be inferred from a vague headline about AI doing something that's ... checks notes ... already being done? ... Yeah, the safe money is that it's just a scam.
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    How many times is this putz going to post this article under new titles before they are banned?
  • French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for FOSS

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    The important thing is that the doomsday device runs Linux
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    Small progress is still progress. Kick management in the dick, friends.