A tankie says what?

Racism. 1776.

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.

Keep inhaling that Elon hopium and believing in your free market fantasies, buddy

No, we just hate people that glaze ruthless dictators and genocidal maniacs whose whole ethos was contradictory to the very idea of communism just because they had a red flag.

No thanks.

SpaceX has loads of capable engineers. If NASA gets a massive budget increase, they need to draw from that pool of talent.

knows how to make himself look smart

He said, talking about the guy who did a nazi salute on national television, intentionally, and then turned around and did it again for the people in the back. In case there was anyone who missed it the first time.

Ruthless "dictators" who saved a billion lives through the elimination of Nazism, the industrial development of the second most populous country on Earth and half the continent of Europe, and through the refusal to participate in the exploitation of the global south.

Communists saved Europe from Nazism and you will never forgive them for it

Does the UN do anything? You know it’s just another one of those US creations.

Any evidence to this? Even if it is true I doubt it's evenly distributed.

If the state is bad giving it a company just seems dumb. Giving the workers ownership, like profit share, only supports working class people.

You must be fun at parties

This meme is even more annoying than SpaceX employees being ordered to cheer.

I've been saying this for years. the footprint that spaceX represents in national launch authority is out of whack to say the least.

Data is nice. I lived in West Africa for nearly a decade total, up until 18 months ago, working on economic devlopment. The data is notoriously bad, and you're comparing apples and camels.

Look, we have in common that we want to see greater African agency and less European colonialism of any sort (or Chinese for that matter).

That being said, I have seen dozens of examples of greed and corruption being the driving force behind nationalization. Often with only the short-sighted goal of raiding capital investment accounts and giving friends jobs. And nearly every time leading to costly failure. Decades of exampes, from Idi Amin to Zambia to South Africa to Mali to DRC to Tanzania to Niger to Ghana, across every possible industry, show that the only only only result from nationalizing something is killing it, and killing it stupidly. Down to things like water desalination plants, power distribution companies, or telecom companies. Maybe you can find a few that are barely solvent across a continent of 54 counties and 1 billion people. The rule is that it's always a play to line pockets and buy a flat on London or Paris and horde wealth for yourself.

And keep in mind that nationalizing something is eliminant domain of stuff. It's theft with a sorry card. Not for some greater good, to make someone else rich, not the first guy.

The result is my daily experience anywhere other than SA, Morocco, and Kenya: the power goes out for hours at a time most days, water comes from a truck and maaaaybe on Mondays or Tuesdays from the city, and mobile phone and internet only works from private companies like MTN or Vodaphone. Often that buy out the old, failing government telco for the license and have to pay hundreds of ghost workers that were promised jobs by a president way back when.

You should note that one of the wealthiest counties per capita in SSA, is Botswana. Which is basically a podunk AF suburb of Pretoria/Joburg anyway. But they never nationalized their diamond mines, and their population is relatively better off. Riddle me this - why has Botswana been the success story with a PPP while all these places with nationalized everything struggle to literally keep the lights on?

Which is not to excuse the bad parts of the system. I once spent a couple years living in a rural village of about 400 people in Niger, and we had a brackish well. A few people wondered of it might be oil. Clearly, it's not. But all I could was warn them they should hope is not oil, and the dangers of being near extractive industry. Mines are more often than not, a blight on the earth.

NASA hasn't take the slightest risk since Challenger. They wouldn't have accomplished 1/20th of the launch capability SpaceX has developed in the last 5 years.

They say this is for enterprise and government, and they talk about "terminals". This seems more like a Hughes network, and let me tell you, if it's that bad, you want nothing to do with it.

Thanks for murdering a perfectly good bit.

From what I understand the Ukrainians never had control of the nukes, they didn't actually have the launch codes to use them.

Regardless, having global access to the internet is great. Ask the people living in remote areas of the Amazon, no chance for them to get fiber, or Africa, or remote islands, or ships/airplanes.

If youre speaking of rural America not needing starlink because fiber is a thing, then you should broaden your horizons

I'm sure digging fiber out in the Amazon rainforest will turn out great