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We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

Technology
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  • Nah fuck the shareholders, if they do something we depend on and pay for it with tax dollars then we should own them.

    Yeah, we're not going to nationalize the entire economy because that's really stupid. Our tax dollars reach every nook and carny of the economy, but that's fine. Tax dollars are meant to be used in a way that makes the country operate safely, smoothly, and reliably. A lot of this is done by putting the money back into the economy in the form of subsidies, welfare, wages, and government contracts. It's fine for the government to pay a business to provide as long as the business is offering fair market prices and they're delivering an acceptable product or service. The tax money that goes into such a business doesn't just go to the shareholders, it also goes to everybody else as well.

    That being said, shareholders can be scumbags, I'm with you there. If they are clearly conducting unethical behavior or illegal behavior then they should be immediately cut off. This includes things like delivering unacceptable products and services by cutting too many corners or committing fraud to take more tax money than they should or trying to scheme to monopolize and so on. These types of shareholders should've receive bailouts or awarded government contracts, they should be thrown in jail. But we shouldn't nationalize the economy because some shareholders are crooks.

  • The problem would be that nationalising them in this day and age would mean prices would get even worse for everyone, as the government having a monopoly on these things would mean they can charge whatever they want, and with the amount of debt and deficit they have, they’d charge a lot.

    As we all know, private corporations don't charge whatever they want, and don't jack up the prices because of a "Fuck you, why not?" fee and bill.

  • No, this is just pure ignorance. The US never nationalized any sector. The US has only used nationalization as a means to stabilize certain sectors from collapse temporarily, and even this happens very rarely.

    Nationalization stable, growing industries would have devastating impacts on the economy. These companies are running just fine, and they're providing their services reliably and at competitive prices, what would be the justification to nationalize them? If the government feels like it needs more control on these companies they can pass regulations, and if they want total control then they should launch their own public alternatives.

    Gotcha. So fascism it is then. How's that working out for y'all? Lmao

    Your comment doesn't make sense. You say the US never nationalized and in the next sentence you say that they have. Remember after the 2008 collapse when the automotive industry was nationalized for a while and the government made a profit? Maybe you need to check your own ignorance.

  • Gotcha. So fascism it is then. How's that working out for y'all? Lmao

    Your comment doesn't make sense. You say the US never nationalized and in the next sentence you say that they have. Remember after the 2008 collapse when the automotive industry was nationalized for a while and the government made a profit? Maybe you need to check your own ignorance.

    Gotcha. So fascism it is then. How’s that working out for y’all? Lmao

    This is going to be shocking for you, but there's more to politics than fascism and marxism

    Your comment doesn’t make sense. You say the US never nationalized and in the next sentence you say that they have.

    My point was that the US never nationalized any sector permanently for the sake of making it public. It also temporarily nationalized portions of some sectors to stabilize them before making them private again.

  • Tankie your ass. You don't have to have a shitty dictatorship to have nationalized services. Clearly you don't know as much as you think you do.

    Most countries have public options for services and private alternatives as either competitors, backups, or complimentary pieces. It's very rare for countries to completely nationalize sectors, and it's especially rare for them to national that many sectors.

  • 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 love how you completely ignore how starlink is only viable for ukraine because the US military industrial complex.

    There was satellite internet before Starlink and Starlink should be banned for all the 5ghz interference it creates

  • Thanks for murdering a perfectly good bit.

    Nobody knows what your bit is. That’s why you’re getting downvoted.

  • We now live in a world controlled by Sociopathic Oligarchs who can afford to create government level technology.

    People have lived in that world for most/all of human history. Assuming you come from the west, you're coming from a place where for the last couple of hundred years it's been more cost effective to just buy the government instead. Is that better? Maybe, it's a little more stable. I dunno if it's good though.

    It’s hilarious seeing all these “anti oligarch” people come out of the woodwork now that it’s a catchphrase of their political party, despite that party being run by oligarchs.

    Like you said, this is how the world has been essentially forever. People are only against it now that their teams oligarchs are upset that they aren’t in as much control as usual.

  • You don’t nationalise a company (SpaceX) just because the existing government owned company (NASA) is significantly worse. What do you think would happen to SpaceX if they did nationalise it? Lol. It would go to hell, like NASA.

    The government should not be responsible for things like this. The government should provide services for necessities for human rights and general standards of living, but they shouldn’t take over successful companies just because they couldn’t do it themselves.

    sure thing freedumb bro.

    imho, we've over-privatized and that's what's to blame ULA for. NASA used to design it's own. Bringing spacex into federal control also prevents further idiocy re: starshield, the ISS, and a whole lot more. I get you don't like it, but between Ketamine bro and these spasms of 'I'll cancel dragon! - nyaaah' we have literally put all our eggs in one basket being held by a drug addled manchild.

  • SpaceX and starlink have had very little success the last few years? What have you been smoking?!

    Compared to previously SpaceX has been seeing more and more failed launches, Starlink is banned in a number of countries and there are already other low orbit internet satellite providers popping up.

  • If not Musk should be forced from his roles in these companies. You cannot be a defense contractor and do ketamine.

    how can you trust a board that trusts such incompetence, for DOD projects no less?

    failure up and down.

  • Most countries have public options for services and private alternatives as either competitors, backups, or complimentary pieces. It's very rare for countries to completely nationalize sectors, and it's especially rare for them to national that many sectors.

    Yep that's my point. Not everything needs be a business.

  • Yeah, we're not going to nationalize the entire economy because that's really stupid. Our tax dollars reach every nook and carny of the economy, but that's fine. Tax dollars are meant to be used in a way that makes the country operate safely, smoothly, and reliably. A lot of this is done by putting the money back into the economy in the form of subsidies, welfare, wages, and government contracts. It's fine for the government to pay a business to provide as long as the business is offering fair market prices and they're delivering an acceptable product or service. The tax money that goes into such a business doesn't just go to the shareholders, it also goes to everybody else as well.

    That being said, shareholders can be scumbags, I'm with you there. If they are clearly conducting unethical behavior or illegal behavior then they should be immediately cut off. This includes things like delivering unacceptable products and services by cutting too many corners or committing fraud to take more tax money than they should or trying to scheme to monopolize and so on. These types of shareholders should've receive bailouts or awarded government contracts, they should be thrown in jail. But we shouldn't nationalize the economy because some shareholders are crooks.

    we’re not going to nationalize the entire economy because that’s really stupid.

    Yes, that's why no one in this entire thread suggested anything even remotely close to this. it's stupid, and a stupid strawman.

    Nationalizing spaceX temporarily in order to restore confidence in it's largest, most important customer, after that customer's trust has been repeatedly violated by the executive and the board that keeps him in power, is NOT NATIONALIZING THE ENTIRE ECONOMY nor would it be untoward if Boeing or Lockheed's CEO was dumb enough to engage in this bullshit.

  • Gotcha. So fascism it is then. How’s that working out for y’all? Lmao

    This is going to be shocking for you, but there's more to politics than fascism and marxism

    Your comment doesn’t make sense. You say the US never nationalized and in the next sentence you say that they have.

    My point was that the US never nationalized any sector permanently for the sake of making it public. It also temporarily nationalized portions of some sectors to stabilize them before making them private again.

    Omg you really think you're smarter than everyone. Of course there's in-between. Lmao glad you were able to clear it up for yourself.

  • And the international customers, what about them? The ground stations, POPs, and terminals in other countries, hmmmm?

    SpaceX's largest customer is the US government; once that relationship has been repaired I'm ambivalent about private/public ownership.

    HMmmmM?

    because let's be honest, without tons of US GOV'T SUPPORT, SpaceX wouldn't have ever been able to provide all those POPs, terminals and services. Funny thing that.

  • The precedent that will set and the implications... No... We should not do this.

    The precedent that will set and the implications

    and what precedent is there for dealing with the executive of your country's entire space launch infrastructure when they become dependent on horse drugs?

    No really, what's the precedent here, I want to know. Because if we set a precedent by ignoring it until the problem is impossible to ignore, that's gonna be a far more expensive fix.

    So yeah, yeah we should consider this very strongly.

  • Tankies live in alternate reality where they think that nationalization is extremely common and is a magical solution to all of societies problems... even though this view is entirely delusional.

    For example, only 3 countries have nationalized the entire ISP industry, and those are Cuba, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. All three of which are horrid tyrannical dictatorships with horrible internet. We should NOT be like them. Even when it comes to health insurance, except for 3 countries I just mentioned, every single country allows private health insurance, even if their system is public. Clearly nationalization is not what you think it is.

    Tankies

    boy howdy you've got the entire strawman army mustered in this thread.

  • Yeah, if they want to make satellites last longer, they could go a bit higher in their orbits. The option is there.

    That would also make latency worse and the signal weaker.

    Would the small ground starlink dish be able to reach higher orbits? I guess if the satellite is going to stay up longer you could afford to make it's antennas a bit bigger to mitigate that.

  • Please. They only exist because of government funding. If NASA had as many rockets explode as SpaceX has, people like you would be screaming about the waste of taxpayer dollars.

    Also, it's only a matter of time before starlink satellites crash into each other and start a chain reaction. You can kiss space travel goodbye after that.

    isn't it amazing how much private companies can do when given hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from the federal teat?

    wow. that private enterprise just rocketing up out of the atmosphere by yanking on it's bootstraps so hard.

    just, you know, after a few more hundred million, burp. ahem. just a few more.

  • I think that's a complicated question. It's both yes and no. Yes, we should nationalize them. No, nationalizing them should not be by tRump. That sets the precedent, or at least reinforces, the concept that the architecture of industry can be nationalized as payback for petty political squabbling. They should be nationalized, however, because fElon has proven himself to be unstable, reckless, petty, and a risk to the nation.

    remember the halcyon days when NASA could do something and the president might not like it, but they were all FUCKING ADULTS and the grift was well distributed amongst the congresscreatures, so it never devolved into adolescent twitter whining?

    goddamn those were better than whatever this shit is

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    Of all the crap that comes out of the dipshit-in-chief's mouth, the one thing I really wish he would've followed through on was deporting Elmo.
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    presidentcamacho@lemmy.caP
    It costs a million, but you cum billions
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    omegalemmy@discuss.onlineO
    American individualism is when you believe everyone is as bad as you or worse Self-fulfilling prophecy when they never want to cooperate in fear of being ripped off
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    I suspect people (not billionaires) are realising that they can get by with less. And that the planet needs that too. And that working 40+ hours a week isn’t giving people what they really want either. Tbh, I don't think that's the case. If you look at any of the relevant metrics (CO², energy consumption, plastic waste, ...) they only know one direction globally and that's up. I think the actual issues are Russian invasion of Ukraine and associated sanctions on one of the main energy providers of Europe Trump's "trade wars" which make global supply lines unreliable and costs incalculable (global supply chains love nothing more than uncertainty) Uncertainty in regards to China/Taiwan Boomers retiring in western countries, which for the first time since pretty much ever means that the work force is shrinking instead of growing. Economical growth was mostly driven by population growth for the last half century with per-capita productivity staying very close to inflation. Disrupting changes in key industries like cars and energy. The west has been sleeping on may of these developments (e.g. electric cars, batteries, solar) and now China is curbstomping the rest of the world in regards to market share. High key interest rates (which are applied to reduce high inflation due to some of the reason above) reduce demand on financial investments into companies. The low interest rates of the 2010s and also before lead to more investments into companies. With interest going back up, investments dry up. All these changes mean that companies, countries and people in the west have much less free cash available. There’s also the value of money has never been lower either. That's been the case since every. Inflation has always been a thing and with that the value of money is monotonically decreasing. But that doesn't really matter for the whole argument, since the absolute value of money doesn't matter, only the relative value. To put it differently: If you earn €100 and the thing you want to buy costs €10, that is equivalent to if you earn €1000 and the thing you want to buy costing €100. The value of money dropping is only relevant for savings, and if people are saving too much then the economy slows down and jobs are cut, thus some inflation is positive or even required. What is an actual issue is that wages are not increasing at the same rate as the cost of things, but that's not a "value of the money" issue.
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    Same, especially when searching technical or niche topics. Since there aren't a ton of results specific to the topic, mostly semi-related results will appear in the first page or two of a regular (non-Gemini) Google search, just due to the higher popularity of those webpages compared to the relevant webpages. Even the relevant webpages will have lots of non-relevant or semi-relevant information surrounding the answer I'm looking for. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but Gemini is probably just scraping a handful of websites on the first page, and since most of those are only semi-related, the resulting summary is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. I also think there's probably something in the code that looks for information that is shared across multiple sources and prioritizing that over something that's only on one particular page (possibly the sole result with the information you need). Then, it phrases the summary as a direct answer to your query, misrepresenting the actual information on the pages they scraped. At least Gemini gives sources, I guess. The thing that gets on my nerves the most is how often I see people quote the summary as proof of something without checking the sources. It was bad before the rollout of Gemini, but at least back then Google was mostly scraping text and presenting it with little modification, along with a direct link to the webpage. Now, it's an LLM generating text phrased as a direct answer to a question (that was also AI-generated from your search query) using AI-summarized data points scraped from multiple webpages. It's obfuscating the source material further, but I also can't help but feel like it exposes a little of the behind-the-scenes fuckery Google has been doing for years before Gemini. How it bastardizes your query by interpreting it into a question, and then prioritizes homogeneous results that agree on the "answer" to your "question". For years they've been doing this to a certain extent, they just didn't share how they interpreted your query.
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    Brother I live in western Europe and of the 6 supermarkets in my smallish city, 4 offer the handscanner. It's incredibly common here, and very convenient.
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    For sure they are! Meta more then the others though
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    Jesus that's just straight up porn